Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 / Gregory M

......

Popular History

and the Literary

Marketplace

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb i 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1312:58:13 PMPM studies in print culture & the history of the book

Editorial Advisory Board Roger Chartier Robert A. Gross Joan Shelley Rubin Michael Winship

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Popular History and the literary

marketplace, –

......

gregory m. pfitzer

University of Massachusetts Press amherst & boston

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb iiiiii 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1312:58:13 PMPM Copyright © 2008 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 2007024295 ISBN 978-1-55849-625-5 (paper); 624-8 (library cloth) Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Monotype Bulmer, Engravers Bold, and Madrone types by BookComp, Inc. Printed and bound by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pﬁ tzer, Gregory M. Popular history and the literary marketplace, 1840–1920 / Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer. p. cm. — (Studies in print culture and the history of the book) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55849-625-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-55849-624-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States—Historiography. 2. Historiography—United States—History—19th century. 3. Historiography—United States—History—20th century. 4. Historiography—Economic aspects—United States—History. 5. History publishing—United States—History. 6. United States—Intellectual life—19th century. 7. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. 8. Historians—United States—Biography. 9. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 10. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. E175.P478 2008 973.072—dc22 2007024295

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb iviv 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1312:58:13 PMPM for michael & sally —still the “two greatest kids in town”

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List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes” Deﬁ ning Popular History 1 Chapter 1 When Popular History Was Popular Washington Irving, George Lippard, John Frost, and Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century 18 Chapter 2 The “Terrible Image Breaker” William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History 73 Chapter 3 The Metahistorian as Popularizer John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History 123 Chapter 4 “The Past Everything” Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History 179 Chapter 5 “A Background of Real History” Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as Popular History 227 Chapter 6 Writing Himself Out of Trouble Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History 282 Conclusion The Unpopularity of Popular History 332 Notes 349 Bibliography 433 Index 455

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Advertisement for Ridpath’s History of the World 2

Retrospective article in the Philadelphia Record on the writings of George Lippard 62

Frontispiece to Part One of the subscription series for Bryant’s Popular History 78

A “Bem Method” chart illustrating Ridpath’s linear approach to history 140

“The Ships of Columbus” from Eggleston’s Household History of the United States and Its People 202

Frontispiece from salesman’s dummy for Ellis’s History of Our Country 260

Promotional brochure for Julian Hawthorne and Company 328

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb ixix 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1412:58:14 PMPM BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb x 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1412:58:14 PMPM Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this book came from a series of questions posed by the late Harvard professor of history John Clive to students in his rigorous course on the history of historical writing. As an advanced graduate student, I audited this course—twice, in fact—without completing it; the distractions of teaching and dissertation writing were simply too great to allow me to fulfi ll the obligations of the syllabus, although I learned a great deal from the sections I did fi nish. It was Clive’s practice to begin the course by passing out a list of pertinent questions for students to keep in mind as they read dozens of works by important European and American historians, from Edward Gibbon to Henry Adams. The reading list was intimidating, to be sure—any course that begins with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must be, I suppose—but the questions treating various aspects of historical texts as literary productions, including subject matter, style, structure, historical argument and explanation, were especially challenging. “What is the role of human reason in these narratives?” Clive asked students. “How does the historian depict character?” “What is the tone of the history? Serious? Ironical? Polemical? Matter-of-fact?” “Is description sometimes synonymous with explanation?” and so on. I’ll never forget Professor Clive’s reaction when I went to see him for the second time to say I would not be able to complete the course. “Mr. Pfi tzer,” he said in his quaint manner, “You’re going to have to face these questions at some point, you know.” And he was right, of course. Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 is my effort to offer answers to these important matters and to fulfi ll my unmet obligations to Professor Clive. Further inspiration for this book derived from recent trends in historiography over the last two decades. Like many graduate students in the 1980s interested in the literary underpinnings of historical works, I found my way eventually to Hayden White, who challenged me to recognize the “deep structure of the historical imagination” in dominant linguistic forms. White’s “metahistorical approach” led me to works by Robert J. Berkhofer Jr., David Harlan, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a very diverse group of scholars, to be sure, who elaborated on or took issue with White’s controlling ideas about the literary turn in historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their collective writings caused me to refl ect more deeply on the narrative structure of history. In reading their works I was compelled to consider explicitly the role of memory in the preservation of history as well as the mechanisms by

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb xixi 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1412:58:14 PMPM which we construct narratives about the past and the standards by which we determine what constitutes historical truth. I also came under the infl uence of scholars interested in the history of the book, Michael Winship, in particular, who elaborated in meaningful ways the power of texts to shape cultural meaning. Finally, I was affected profoundly in my thinking by scholars and former mentors David Donald, Alan Brinkley, Charlie Bassett, and Richard Moss, all of whom have been productive teachers and scholars of things historical. From the late 1980s to the present, I have had the benefi t of the wisdom of my Skid- more College colleagues in American studies, Mary Lynn, Joanna Zangrando, Dan Nathan, Joshua Woodfork, Richard Kim, Janet Casey, and Nancy Otrem- biak, who advised me in various capacities with respect to this book and other matters of importance to the profession while I was writing it. Thank you also to my friends David Baum, Neil Jumonville, and Gordon Hylton, who have taken time over the years to discuss this project with me during lengthy phone conversations, between pitches at baseball and softball tournaments, and during substitutions at noontime basketball games. In completing my work, I benefi ted from the helpful advice of members of several professional organizations who were generous enough to comment on my “popular history” presentations, including those from the Great Lakes Association of Colleges and Universities, the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Studies Association. Deans Chuck Joseph, Muriel Poston, and Mark Hofmann and members of the Faculty Development Committee at Skidmore College provided various travel stipends and a Major Projects Completion Grant for two research trips to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I have made extensive use of the personal papers of popular historians, publishers, book agents, and readers scattered across the country as well. Some of these materials are housed in substantial archival collections, such as the Columbia Uni- versity Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Olin Library at Cornell University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, the Princeton University Archives, the Harvard University Archives, and the American An- tiquarian Society. Others are in more specialized collections associated with the Western Association of Writers at the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Historical Society, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and DePauw University. Still others are available only to those with an explorer’s sense of intellectual adventure, such as the back issues of Publishers’ Weekly that I discovered in a dimly lit closet on the second fl oor of the reading room at the Huntington Library. I wish to thank the staffs of all these institutions (big and small) as well as others listed in the bibliography for their aid in research and xii } Acknowledgments

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb xiixii 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1412:58:14 PMPM for permission to cite sources in their collections. Thanks as well to editors Paul Wright and Clark Dougan, director Bruce Wilcox, managing editor Carol Betsch, and other members of the hardworking staff of the University of Mas- sachusetts Press who have done so much to advance an appreciation for the history of books. Many of the texts I analyze in Popular History and the Literary Marketplace as well as some of the materials I cite relative to book agents, readers, and reviewers of popular histories were discovered through extensive Internet and eBay searches. During the better part of the decade on which I was at work on this book, I amassed a small library of well-worn histories and complementary sources that have helped me to understand how these histories functioned in the literary marketplace. I found a “salesman’s dummy” used for subscription sales of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States and another for Ridpath’s Popular History of the United States. I located publicity brochures for Edward Ellis’s The People’s Standard History of the United States, complete with sample illustrations and maps. I purchased publishers’ handbooks fi lled with useful instructions to book agents for selling volumes such as Edward Eggleston’s Household History of the United States. And I discovered an original brochure documenting the failed business ventures of the popular historian Julian Haw- thorne. Using various search engines on the Internet, I even managed to track down and interview relatives of the various nineteenth-century popular historians I study in this book, most of whom were every bit as engaging and down- to-earth as their ancestors evidently were. The fact that I was able to purchase these popular histories, salesman’s dummies, and publicity brochures on eBay serves as a reminder that the fate of popular history as a genre is still very much conditioned by the circumstances of the marketplace. Part of the purpose of this book is to consider how the laws of supply and demand infl uenced our defi nition of what constituted the popular in nineteenth-century America and how those laws continue today to shape our perceptions of what is important to remember and celebrate in our heritage. Finally, I thank my wife, Mia, and members of my immediate and extended families (the Pfi tzers and the McCrossans) for sticking with me through the production of this book. It scares and saddens me a bit to think how often I may have shirked my daily responsibilities to them in my efforts to lose myself in these nineteenth-century texts. More than once my loved ones have had to shake me back to the present where history meets reality in startling and disruptive ways in the form of dishes to be done, lawns to be mowed, and mortgages to be paid. Here again, however, there is a neat consistency between the kinds of distractions the writers of these popular histories experienced in producing their works and those that contemporary historiographers, such Acknowledgments { xiii

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb xiiixiii 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1412:58:14 PMPM as myself, face in writing about them. Popular historians of the nineteenth century often lamented the fact that they were too distracted by the press of daily concerns to give themselves over completely to the past, and so it has been with me. But some things in the present are more precious than those in the past and remind us of the dangers of our escapist fantasies. That is why, most of all, I want to thank my son and daughter, Michael and Sally, who grew up with this book. Memories of their fading childhoods, which I associate so closely with the production of this work, have increased my appreciation for the importance of history as a device for preserving impressions of what we cannot have back. Michael and Sally are now at colleges in Boston themselves, taking courses from professors who, like John Clive, are challenging them to think about their place in the world, past, present, and future. I look forward to seeing what questions they, too, “are going to have to face” in the years ahead and how they will respond.This work is dedicated with love to them.

xiv } Acknowledgments

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Popular History

and the Literary

Marketplace

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Introduction “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes” Defining Popular History

In the summer of 1908, fi fteen-year-old Huey Long went door-to- door in the parishes of central Louisiana selling books on consignment for a Texas book dealer. Long, who later bragged to his high school friends that he could “sell anything on earth to anybody,” made a decent living that summer peddling a stock of volumes ranging from “trashy books to the fi nest literary and scholarly works.” One can picture young Huey Long as an ambitious junior book vendor, cultivating the arts of sweet persuasion, shameless cajoling and relentless pursuit that would become the trademarks of his later career as a politician. A favorite tactic of his was to memorize and quote verbatim lengthy passages from works such as Ridpath’s three-volume “popular” His- tory of the World (1885) as a way of startling and impressing customers with his striking ability “to photograph whole pages in his mind.”1 Noting that Ridpath’s trilogy “stressed the role of powerful leaders” in world history, Wil- liam Leuchtenburg has argued that this mental exercise provided Huey with models of “unadorned power” on which he relied so heavily later in life.2 As the biographer T. Harry Williams has added, Long knew that “an audacious action” of this sort “could shock people into a state where they could be manipulated.” Huey was “challenged by the possible resistance of buyers” and the “feeling of power” he experienced when he overcame it.3 Long’s success as a book peddler suggests the impact popular historical literature had on certain kinds of readers. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, born in 1900, was among those affected as a young boy by Ridpath’s popular histories. In his autobiographical work, Look Homeward Angel, Wolfe explained the powerful visual and emotional impact of the volumes on his alter ego, Eu- gene Gant. Gant enjoyed nothing better than sitting by the hearth, “spitting clean and powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son’s head into the hissing fi re,” and “poring insatiably over great volumes in the bookcase, exulting in the musty odor of the leaves, and in the pungent smell of their hot hides.” The books he enjoyed most were “three huge calf-skin volumes called Ridpath’s History of the World,” wrote Wolfe, in whose pages “the past unrolled . . . in separate and enormous visions.” The volumes were “illustrated with hundreds

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM Advertisement for John C. Ridpath’s History of the World.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM of drawings, engravings, wood-cuts” that were so narrative in their storytelling elements that they allowed Gant, even as a child, to follow “the progression of the centuries pictorially before he could read.” The images of battle “delighted him most of all,” and his “brain swarmed” with visions of “unend- ing legends” built “upon the pictures of kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by soaring horses.” Something “infi nitely old and recollective seemed to awaken in him as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge beast- bodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon,” Wolfe noted.4 Ridpath had an even more persistent hold on Huey Long’s historical imagination. Years after he was done selling books, Long continued to quote Ridpath’s History of the World, as he did in the 1930s during one memorable speech on the fl oor of the Senate in making the case for his “Share Our Wealth” program.5 Almost fi fty years after it fi rst had been crafted, Long, at least, felt that Ridpath’s historical prose still had relevance. What types of books were these “popular” texts such as Ridpath’s His- tory of the World, and what did their large sales suggest about the ways in which Americans like Huey Long and Thomas Wolfe absorbed lessons from the past? To answer these two questions, which is the central purpose of this book, we must consider these popular histories both as material and as cultural artifacts. First, the material. Reduced to their simplest components, these volumes were works of popular literature every aspect of which was designed to increase sales among readers. Their wide infl uence began with aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of publishers intended to attract readers to widely circulating books in a new mass-market economy with vast implications for historical literacy and learning in America. From the point of view of publishers, the key to success in this literary marketplace was to witness economies of scale that came from selling huge numbers of works at small profi t. The strategy of publishing houses, therefore, was the relatively simple one of reducing profi t margins on the sale of inexpensive books in hopes of expanding market share among a group of new and avid readers. Book agents such as Huey Long understood that the way to achieve distribution runs of the magnitude necessary to realize profi ts in the popular book market was to convince readers that they could not be without such works. The target audience was the growing American middle class. Benson J. Lossing, a historian who produced popular histories that competed well with those of Ridpath in the literary marketplace, declared that he wanted to make history “accessible to our whole population” by producing inexpensive books that would aid in the effort “to scatter the seeds of knowledge” to “those in the humbler walks of society” whose “adventitious circumstances” denied them access “to the full granary Defi ning Popular History { 3

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM of information, where the wealthy are fi lled.”6 Even the pedantic William H. Prescott reminded himself in a private journal entry to “aim at wide rather than deep views, at a popular, rather than an erudite compilation, avoiding intricate research, particularly in antiquities, and particularly too on topics relating to constitutions of Governments, or economy.”7 The results were dramatic. As Paul Gutjahr notes, “[p]ublishers at the turn of the nineteenth century rarely produced print runs over two thousand copies,” but “by mid-century, Ameri- can publishing had so radically changed that editions of 30,000, 75,000, even 100,000 copies were common.”8 As a way of increasing product recognition, publishers also alerted would- be readers to the fact that only the most recognized writers with established literary reputations had been chosen to produce popular volumes. Houses such as Scribner’s, Appleton’s, and Collier’s sought out only those authors whose names were familiar enough to readers to sell books. These writers rarely had formal training as historians; in most cases, in fact, they were poets and novelists who were well known to general American readers, including the novelists Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and George Lip- pard, the poet-journalist William Cullen Bryant, the Indiana “poet-historian” John Clark Ridpath, the local color and regional author Edward Eggleston, the dime novelist Edward S. Ellis, and the realist novelist Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel Hawthorne). Privileging narration and an effusive literary style over dispassionate prose, these writers possessed rhetorical gifts that were valued by many middle-class readers who viewed fi ction and history as inextricably linked. In each case, the favorite literary conventions of these writers with respect to character development, narrative description, tone, point of view, rules of evidence, tense, and plot transferred to their historical prose with an ease that suggested the degree to which they collectively viewed history as literary art. Publishing fi rms advertised the popular histories of these artists as literary accomplishments and acted on the assumption (a correct one as it turned out) that works of history that were poorly written, no matter how thoroughly researched and soundly argued, could not sell enough copies to make them viable economically. The titles of these popular books were important literary markers by which publishers provided readers with useful clues as to their editorial intentions. The histories that “hawkers” such as Long peddled had descriptive headings that fell into two related categories: those that emphasized the domesticity and collective identities of the “people” in their titles, such Eggleston’s The House- hold History of the United States and Its People and Ridpath’s The People’s History of the United States; and those that appealed to the masses of common Americans through use of the descriptive term “popular,” such as Bryant’s or 4 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM Ridpath’s Popular History of the United States. Sellers of popular books in the former category presumed that the American home was the logical starting place for their mass readership campaign, which explains why their door-to- door subscription and consignment techniques worked so well. As George Callcott has suggested, “Historians liked to say that history should be in every home, a hearthside companion for the family.”9 Publishers of popular histories in the latter category hoped their works would be “popular” in the sense we understand that term today—that is, well-liked and well-supported in the marketplace. However, they also conceived of “popular” in the French sense of the term populaire—that is, as something produced for the benefi t of “le peuple.”10 Such usages had obvious nationalizing implications as well. In the Popular History of France from the Earliest Times (1869), Francois Guizot encouraged a sense of cultural democratization among the French by demonstrating to the educated and working classes that they shared a distinct culture of nationalistic values. He also informed readers that he intended to trace those infl uences which affected most profoundly the daily experiences of French commoners and would do so in such a way as to make them understandable to their grandchildren. Infl uenced by French realist novelists, popularizers of history after Guizot sought to delineate the ordinary life of ordinary people and to study that which was habitual in the culture.11 Prefaces and forwards were also opportunities for publishers of popular histories to make their ideological commitments to “the people” clear. Mason Weems, author of a much-celebrated biography of George Washington, was said to be a “writer of the highest order of popularity” because, from the very introductions to his works, he indicated that he desired to capture the imaginations of the American people, “to catch their ear” and to say “exactly what they wanted to hear.”12 Similarly, Joel and Esther Steele in Barnes’ Popular History of the United States (1875) announced that their volume was not intended for antiquarians, students, or scholars merely but for the “general reading public” who needed guidance in the ways of patriotism and citizenship. They believed that a noteworthy “popular history” must produce a “truer reverence for the past, a purer patriotism for the present and a more hopeful outlook for the future.”13 Marketers were especially adept at promoting the patriotic benefi ts of popular texts that embraced a spirit of democratic, middle-class sentimentality.14 Expansion of the market encouraged those active in the book trade to believe that they were serving patriotic purposes by satisfying democratic appetites, while booksellers did what they could to convince customers that the consumption of popular histories was a political act of great signifi cance for national progress. “History could impart its delights ‘only when read by adequate numbers,’ ” noted one astute observer of the scene, while another Defi ning Popular History { 5

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM added: “If the past provided entertainment for ‘the few,’ then it was a service to extend it also to ‘the general reader.’ ”15 If appeal to good writing, patriotism, domesticity, and middle-class sensibilities proved insuffi cient to convince would-be customers to open up their pocketbooks to purchase these histories, traveling book salesmen could rely on sensational packaging to charm the reluctant into purchases. Despite old cautions against judging books by their covers, potential buyers were often easily distracted by the outward appearances of popular books, which, like the agents such as Huey Long who sold them, were ingratiating and somewhat outrageous in style, folksy and hypnotic in rhetorical manner, and unforgettable in terms of visual packaging. As Thomas Wolfe’s description of the visual impact of Ridpath’s History of the World implies, popular histories were easy to spot in their day because they were characterized by certain physical elements related to ease of transport and circulation. They were printed on lightweight and cheap paper and usually sold by subscription in unbound segments or “parts”; sometimes they were republished later in sturdier, cloth formats. The quality of the inks used in many of the original editions was substandard as well, although the texts were embellished frequently with lavish and eye- catching illustrations, while their covers were embossed in accordance with the best traditions of pictorial book design.16 Color was a particular selling point after the 1870s, as publishers used three- and four-pigment chromolithography to adorn their popular texts. These ornamented books became objects and “works of art” to be collected, part of the intellectual bric-a-brac of the nineteenth century that middle-class Americans displayed on their coffee tables and in their parlors as ways of demonstrating their learnedness. So lavish were some of the covers of these popular books that their marketers came to believe that the cosmetic components of bookmaking were the most essential to a literary work’s success, even more important, perhaps, than the quality of the story they embellished. Mason Weems (who sold books before he turned popular author) argued that the key to promoting a popular biography of even so popular a fi gure as George Washington was to have “regiments upon regiments in red and gold to fl ash around.” Worry not about the quality of the writing, he counseled, since “[t]he 17 name—the noise—the Eclate is EVERYTHING.” Second, with regard to popular books as cultural artifacts, these works were highly signifi cant for the manner in which they affected the ways Americans absorbed lessons from the past. For one thing, they infl uenced the very chan- nels of communication through which average citizens gained access to history. Prior to the revolution in print culture that encouraged the production of such popular works, history was preserved primarily in artifact collections and in source documents housed in athenaeums, archives, and local historical 6 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM societies to which few had access. Many people “heard” local history based on these materials as recounted in commemorative orations by ancient town fathers, but only a select group of highly educated patrons “read” the past as presented in complex, multivolume works by patrician historians such as Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and John Lothrop Motley.18 “Popular history” books of the mid-nineteenth century were different from these earlier antiquarian efforts, however, in that their circulation-minded authors and publishers geared them toward a much wider reading public in hopes of giving more Americans access to historical resources and insights and of profi ting from them. Sales fi gures tell the story of a cottage industry that exploded after the Civil War.19 Some popular texts, such as Mary Howitt’s Popular History of the United States of America (1860), sold tens of thousands of copies during a short production life (one year), while others, such as Hamilton Mabie’s Popular History of the United States (1897), sold slowly but steadily in multiple editions over three decades.20 Jack Carter Thompson has made an exhaustive study of the number of times publishers of histories reissued their books in the nineteenth century and has identifi ed dozens of historical works that qualifi ed as “popular” in terms of book sales.21 The proliferation of such works speaks to the commodifi cation of literary and historical culture that occurred as a result of mass production, since readers demonstrated their increasing historical appetites by choosing to purchase and “own” books in impressive numbers.22 These popular works also introduced new literary strategies for treating the past. Despite the distinctions that marked the individual styles of the novelists and poets who wrote these histories (and these were signifi cant at times), all popularizers faced similar challenges with respect to how to tell the story of the past. They confronted diffi cult questions, such as: What is our relationship to the past, and how should we narrate it? Is it possible to write a spirited narrative account of American history without allowing the storytelling function of narrative to distort the facts of the American past? Not surprisingly, the responses of popularizers to these questions were conditioned by their literary preferences and choices. Form and function were inextricably linked in such works, and history seemed to derive its meaning as much from the form of the narrative conventions that popularizors employed as from the past itself.23 Consequently these popular histories suggest a good deal about the intellectual constructs used by nineteenth-century Americans to organize and fi lter historical experience. One of the important goals of Popular History and the Literary Market- place is to consider what these forms indicate about the specifi c uses of historical evidence made by popularizers of history like Irving, Lippard, Bryant, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and Hawthorne and to understand the implications of those uses for popular histories as historical artifacts and cultural agents. Defi ning Popular History { 7

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM The competitive conditions of the literary marketplace were crucial forces in the shaping of responses to these philosophical queries as well. In considering the intellectual underpinnings of such popular works, therefore, I have paid special attention to their production histories, focusing not only on the literary intentions and choices of the writers but also on the roles of publishers, editors, and coauthors. The diverse reading habits of the purchasers of these works and the refl ections of reviewers also conditioned numerous aspects of production. Another purpose of this study, then, is to refl ect meaningfully on how rival narratives of the past did battle with one another for the attentions of readers in the late nineteenth century and to consider what those battles reveal about changing cultural priorities. I have tried to demonstrate how each writer’s literary and philosophical choices concerning narration and historical explanation offered readers a range of competing “imagined histories” from which to pick.24 In its purest sense, then, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace is a chapter in the “history of the book,” contributing to an appreciation of the ways that the production, dissemination, and reception of texts advance cultural agendas.25 These popular histories also suggest important things about the appetites of American readers in the nineteenth century, although precisely what they reveal about reader response is often diffi cult to determine with precision. As scholars of book history will attest, the most diffi cult aspect of measuring the impact of works in the popular book market is in evaluating why and how readers read. There is a substantial review literature available in newspapers and periodicals that gives us a sense of how experienced critics of literature responded to these texts. But what of the thousands of common readers who purchased them? We know very little about these consumers beyond what anecdotal evidence in the form of book agents’ letters or subscription lists suggests. There is also no way to measure adequately whether the category “books purchased” is synonymous with that of “books read.” Popular histories were collected and displayed in the manner of coffee-table publications today, but they may not have been read thoroughly or at all by those who purchased them and hence may not have infl uenced the popular imagination to the degree that large sales fi gures would imply. And what of books that were purchased by one owner but circulated among many readers, as with a library copy or books for a reading club? Clearly the category “total sales” of a book is not an adequate standard of measure for determining reading preferences. Despite the best efforts of receptivity theorists, it is still diffi cult to ascertain how and why people read and nearly impossible to construct a defi nition of popular history based solely on demand for books as refl ected in sales or circulation. Concerning the receptivity of popular texts in the culture at large, we do know that, while these books sold well, they were not universally liked. Almost 8 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1512:58:15 PMPM from the inception of the genre, in fact, scholars took issue with the fact that many popular histories were too literary and polemical in conception. Many of these critics associated popular history with a particular style of loose or undisciplined writing, and they resented the literary concessions popularizers made to readers which seemed to compromise the integrity of their texts. There is no question that popularizers cut corners. Eschewing footnotes and bibliographic materials that they imagined would clog up a narrative, producers of popular history emphasized the storytelling functions of history, highlighting character development and plot structure over the delineation of impersonal processes. The storylines within these histories were almost always descriptive rather than analytical, conforming to linguistic and grammatical tendencies implicit in Western storytelling. Their authors often employed rhetorical devices intended to give readers the illusion of participation in historical events. Popularizing in this sense meant reducing history to a moral drama through the use of various literary devices such as second-person narration or the present tense to refl ect on “our personal destiny, our ambition, our moral worth.”26 From the 1880s on, scholars objected with increasing rancor to the “ ‘intrusive’ authorial presence, the explicit moralizing, and overt partisanship” of these works and labeled them “popular” as a way of condemning their “ideological bias and the use of history for purposes of indoctrination.”27 They came to believe, in short, that “whatever popularizes vulgarizes.”28 Critics of popular history were among those who gathered at the fi rst meeting of American Historical Association (AHA) in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1884, where scholars began to develop rigid codes of practice for the pursuit of “professional” historical work. These historians gradually came to view the conspicuously rhetorical quality of much writing in the fi eld of popular history as “something that concealed as much as it revealed” about the “truth” of history. “When science as the preferred foundation for truthfulness became the model of scholarly discourse,” Robert Berkhofer Jr. has noted of this outlook on the part of AHA members, the word rhetoric “took on its modern meaning of superfl uous or meretricious verbiage.”29 The centrality of literary concerns to the study of history was challenged within the profession by scholars who advanced radically different defi nitions of historical evidence and interpretation. They sought to protect history from the vagaries of literature, and, once having done so, they guarded religiously against the “revival of narrative,” fearing (as David Harlan remarked of a later period) that literature might return to history, “unfurling her circus silks of metaphor and allegory, misprision and aporia, trace and sign, demanding that historians accept her mocking presence right at the heart of what they . . . insisted was their own autonomous and truly scientifi c discipline.”30 The process by which popular rhetorical texts Defi ning Popular History { 9

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM lost their place of prominence to those of scholars within the “profession” of history refl ects important shifts in the intellectual climate in America at the turn of the twentieth century and is an important part of this study as well. Another of my goals here is to evaluate what the loss in popularity of popular histories implied for the discipline of history at the end of the nineteenth century. Historians are often interested primarily in the rise of intellectual movements, and I am no exception insofar as this book is concerned with the emergence of popular history at midcentury as a dominant strategy for understanding and disseminating information about the past. In Chapter 1, in fact, I describe the rapid emergence of the genre of popular history during the 1840s and demonstrate how promoters of popular works, such as Evert A. Duyck- inck, used idealistic intellectual arguments to establish the place of literature and poetry in the historical imagination. I concentrate especially on the infl u- ence of widely circulating popular texts, especially those that emphasized the connections among fi ction, romance, and history, such as the works of William Gilmore Simms, Washington Irving, George Lippard, and John Frost. I am also intrigued, however, by the unraveling of the genre of popular history in the late nineteenth century and by what its “fall from grace” suggests about changing cultural priorities in those decades. In this regard I share much in common with those historians who believe that intellectual history is richest when it deals with periods of transition and decline; that is, when it studies how major controlling imperatives are challenged, weakened, and then abandoned over time. Even as I describe the triumphant emergence of popular history as a genre in the early chapters of this book, then, I simultaneously prepare the ground for its decline. Each of the case studies I present in subsequent chapters concentrates on how popular historians dealt with formidable attacks on their historical productions by professional historians and others. As the title of the conclusion to this book implies, I am interested in knowing why popular history became unpopular, and each chapter corresponds with specifi c methodological challenges that popularizers faced in constructing, promoting, and defending their narratives. Chapters 2 through 6 relate in some way to the epistemological crisis that historians experienced at the turn of the century as they experimented with new narrative strategies in the wake of the modernist critique of nineteenth- century romantic traditions. Central to each of the popularizers whose works are described here was the question: “Can we really know what happened in the past, and, if so, how can we best tell its story?” Chapter 2, for instance, explores a compromise solution to these challenges reached by the poet-journalist, Wil- liam Cullen Bryant and his former colleague at the New York Tribune, Sydney Howard Gay, who produced a four-volume popular history for Scribner’s in 10 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1010 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM the 1870s and early 1880s. The production history of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States was marked by moments of obvious contention as each author attempted to stamp the popular history with his own literary style. Bryant’s poetic voice often confl icted directly with Gay’s more scientifi c perspective on the past. At issue was the degree to which popular history should challenge or tinker with the accepted mythologies of the people. Bryant and Gay were able to reconcile their differences eventually and in ways that suggest the value of negotiated history, but, despite these compromises, the coauthors could not satisfy their publisher’s desire for a seamless production based on consistent strategies of presentation. Indeed, Scribner worried aloud about the commercial implications of a work that vacillated so wildly between the theatrical sentimentality of Bryant and the dispassionate prose of Gay. In the publisher’s mind, their curious hybrid work raised as many practical and methodological questions about popular history as it answered, including: Does narrativity require ordering strategies that by defi nition corrupt the historical record? and Is there such a thing as a “poetics” of history? Gay was a believer in the inscrutability of facts and argued that a direct correspondence between the past and the study of the past could be achieved, while Bryant was an epistemological skeptic who was inclined to view history as a branch of imaginative literature. In Chapter 3, I extend the discussion of these methodological themes by tracing the popular works of poet-historian John Clark Ridpath and his efforts to transcend the dichotomies implicit in the subjective/objective duality of Bryant and Gay by recourse to “metahistorical” generalizations or covering laws that operated through history. Ridpath, one of the fi rst college professors of history in the country, left the academy in the 1880s to write for the popular book market, where he felt he could indulge his poetic, philosophical impulses more freely. Heavily infl uenced by the Western Association of Writers of which he was a founding member, and in particular by the poet and fellow Hoosier James Whitcomb Riley, Ridpath became interested in the “subjective agencies of the human story,” emphasizing “the actors in the human drama as distinguished from the acts” of history. Wrestling with the question of whether historical meaning inheres in facts or in universal laws derived from facts, Ridpath tried to identify subjective processes that underlay the objective substance of the past. In so doing, he was attacked by former colleagues who “dreaded an entangling alliance with philosophy” and who rejected teleological systems as the bedrock of history.31 Though Ridpath claimed that facts were prior to interpretation, some believed that his metahistorical preferences were just mythic overlays designed to distort the historical record by promoting pet theories of causation. Charged with reductionism, Ridpath responded that history as a discipline was meaningless unless its practitioners made some efforts to reduce Defi ning Popular History { 11

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1111 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM the complexities of the past by reference to established philosophical principles of selection. In this chapter I refl ect on questions that haunted popularizers such as Ridpath in light of these accusations and counter-accusations, including: Did the emergence of a modern sensibility, with its implicit doubts about the stability of universal structuring laws, mean an end to the relevance of history? Was there any order implicit in the past; was there even a past that could be verifi ed from an ontological point of view? In Chapter 4, I suggest that by the turn of the twentieth century, universal laws such as those Ridpath advocated had been discredited and had given way to a general skepticism about the place of grand abstractions in history. Modernism, with its rejection of orderly intellectual systems, encouraged popular historians to study not teleological causes but random processes that revealed the “total experience” of American life at particular cultural moments without reference to reductionist schemes. Popular historians such as Hoo- sier novelist Edward Eggleston, for instance, aspired to treat the “inner life” of human beings at specifi c moments of time in the comprehensive manner of realists. Having established himself in the 1870s as a local colorist and as a realist novelist, Eggleston startled his friends with the announcement in the 1880s that he would abandon literary “causes” in pursuit of what he called “New” History, the study of the “commonplace actualities of early American history” central to “common folk.” A precursor to the “Social History” movement of the early twentieth century, Eggleston’s New History combined the popularizer’s desire to reach wide audiences through broad, generalizing assertions about the past with the professional’s interest in the minute details of everyday life in America. Eggleston structured history not according to some chronological or sequential narrative of events but as an internal, psychological drama underscoring the nonlinear sensibilities of the modernist era. The problem with such a totalizing approach—one in which the popular historian tried to tell “the past everything”—was that in lieu of the principles of selection implicit in a teleological treatment of the past, there was no reliable way to prioritize what was important and what was not important in the historical record. Eggleston’s most popular history, the Household History of the United States and Its People (1889), raised philosophical questions about historical relativism, about the proper scope and ambition of history, and about the appropriate public audiences for popular literature. Eggleston eventually became president of the American Historical Association, an affi liation that signaled his commitment to professional standards but also caused him to question the extent of his infl uence on the general American reading public. Eggleston found it diffi cult to complete even a small portion of the multivolume popular history he envisioned because he could not shake free from the relativism 12 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1212 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM implicit in his training as a realist novelist who overvalued the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the past to the exclusion of singular truths. In Chapter 5, I consider how these relativistic dilemmas infl uenced the strange odyssey that was the career of Edward S. Ellis, who transformed himself with revealing ease from one of America’s most well known writers of fi c- tion to one of its most prolifi c popular historians. As the author of hundreds of dime novels, including the best-selling Seth Jones, Ellis had a reputation for melodrama, sensationalism, and theatricality and was an unlikely candidate for writing history in an age when verisimilitude and objectivity were highly valued. He was accused by critics of corrupting the moral development of young readers through an excess of interest in sensational themes and of being a historian who “invents details” or “seizes upon the unimportant ones” in an effort to enliven the record of the past.32 For his part, Ellis claimed that his spirited narratives were based on a reality “no less thrilling than the unreal” and on facts “no less marvelous than fi ction”; but professional scholars were unconvinced, fi nding in his popular histories “monstrously absurd exaggerations” based on “utterly false and debasing ideas of life.”33 He discovered a receptive audience, however, for popular histories that fl attered readers by focusing on contemporary circumstances above those of the distant past. Ellis’s most popular history, The People’s Standard History of the United States (1899), refl ected the impulsive showmanship of his dime novels and a good deal of the infl ated nationalistic rhetoric of bygone eras as well, but it mainly concentrated on contemporary late nineteenth-century affairs and suggested the degree to which success in the literary marketplace required concessions to the present- mindedness of readers. Ellis also experimented openly with the concept of eternal time in ways that disturbed professionals for what it implied about the looseness of temporal schemes in popular historical narratives. Ellis was accused of approaching the past almost exclusively from the delimiting perspective of contemporary dilemmas and concerns, thereby placing most of the human past outside the scope of what Anne McClintock has called panoptic time and anachronistic space.34 His widely circulating popular works beg the question: Is history inevitably an artifi cial construction when it is based on present concerns as extrapolated back onto the past? In Chapter 6, I consider how Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel and a novelist in his own right, tried to balance some of the philosophical concerns with which all these popularizers were dealing. Ever in the shadow of his more famous father, Julian Hawthorne wrestled throughout his life to reconcile the “world of matter” with the “world of spirit” treated so sensitively in the fi ction of his parent. The author of dozens of little-noticed realist novels, he turned from literature to journalism and fi nally to history, where he made his fi rst real Defi ning Popular History { 13

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1313 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM mark with the publication of Hawthorne’s United States (1899). This work demonstrated just how idiosyncratic and whimsical popular history could be. Eschewing the “hackneyed” things “told in history books,” Hawthorne wrote with a self-righteous moral tone, fi lling the pages of his popular history with highly personalized “philosophical speculations on the nature of man, on human destiny and free will” that he hoped would appeal to average readers in search of “spiritual guidance.” In the end, he did not succeed. Troubled by fi nancial obligations throughout his career, Hawthorne exploited the one marketable commodity he had, his family name, by taking on historical hackwork as an additional source of income and incurring the wrath of professional critics who equated his efforts to reach mass audiences with crude pandering. The rank air of crass materialism clouded his reputation as it did that of the entire fi eld of popular history. Professionals came to view the commodifi cation of culture to which Hawthorne contributed as a sign of the corruption in the popular book market and as an indictment of the culture of mass production that had spawned it. The chapter ends with the sad story of Hawthorne’s imprisonment for mail fraud and the downward spiral of his career in a manner symbolic of the general fall from grace of the fi eld of popular history. The conclusion makes connections among all of the popularizers studied in Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, reminding readers of the complexity of the relationships that existed among writers, editors, publishers, book agents, and reviewers in the literary world they mutually inhabited. It recalls for readers the common problems and challenges novelists-turned- popular historians faced and the gradual eroding over time of the reputation of popular history as a genre. The successful campaign of scholars to establish evidentiary standards within the profession and to substitute an appreciation of cold, raw facts and evaluative rigor for the cult of “narrative, narrative, narrative” was responsible for some of these changes. Sean Wilentz has noted that the “decline of popular history” was conditioned as well by a recognition on the part of readers of history that they must “analyze and act” in the temper of “critical analysis” rather than merely “observe and enjoy” in the spirit of “sentimental appreciation.”35 To be sure, popular history as a genre never vanished, as I demonstrate in the concluding sections of this book. If popular history is understood broadly to include general historical narratives on a variety of topics produced by nonacademics for primarily lay audiences, then certainly we must acknowledge that it persisted well into the twentieth century and lives on in mutated form even today. Allan Nevins, Barbara Tuchman, and David McCullough might all qualify as latter-day popular historians by this defi nition. Defenders of the genre abound at present, arguing that indictments of popular historians by professionals constitute nothing more than “typical 14 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1414 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM ivory-tower hand wringing that underscore[s] the academy’s infl exible attraction to narrow scholarly questions and complete tin ear for the larger market of readers.”36 That said, in the conclusion I also assert that popular history enjoys nothing like the popularity it had in its heyday in the late nineteenth century. Popular History and the Literary Marketplace attempts to explain why. While I do not pretend to have answered defi nitively all of the philosophical questions that I identify as central to the disagreements between popularizers and professionals regarding the proper type and direction of history, I have tried to ground my discussion of these otherwise airy concerns in the concrete details of specifi c literary productions by real historians working out the implications of debate over methodology in practical contexts. There have been a number of important efforts by historiographers to treat the complex ontological and epistemological questions associated with the professionalization of history (see, for instance, the excellent works of Higham, Novick, Harlan, Berkhofer, and others on whom I rely extensively here), but most of these discussions occur on an elevated theoretical plane; few are anchored in the day-to-day practical business of writing and publishing as experienced at all levels of the production history of popular books. I am interested in the practical challenges that popularizers faced in trying to translate their literary and poetic skills to the historical enterprise. How did the experience of writing novels condition Eggleston, Ellis, or Hawthorne to refl ect on history in narrative forms? How did the meter and structure of poetry contribute to the pace of histories produced by Bryant and Ridpath? And what techniques did book agents use to convince readers of the necessity of owning popular works produced in these ways? Since the literary marketplace was the testing ground for the working out of the practical implications of the philosophical questions outlined above, I have focused especially on what Alice Fahs calls the “constel- lation of cultural and economic practices that shaped publishing,” including, “[w]here and how books were actually produced and distributed, the conventions understood to govern their production, the perceived demands of the market, the intentions of authors, [and] the reception of texts by readers.”37 Finally, in addition to telling the stories of the production of these popular histories from the ground up, I have tried to take popularizers more seriously than have some historiographers whose tendency has been to dismiss popular works out-of-hand as the shallow, commercial by-products of a feckless age of mass production. I acknowledge the sometimes comic misrepresentations and errors associated with these quickly produced volumes, but I also recognize the almost certain genius evidenced by popular authors able to condense and make comprehensible to vast audiences of readers large segments of the national past in accessible forms. In the conclusion I argue that scholars have Defi ning Popular History { 15

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1515 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM been too quick to assume that popular books structured along novelistic or poetic lines and committed to constructivist or narrative techniques rather than the cult of objectivity are not worthy of study as historical artifacts. As I argue along with Beard and Novick, the presumption of the existence of an “objective” past by scholars has been at best a “noble dream” and at worst a distracting delusion. Some historians still cling tenaciously to the idea that we can know the past defi nitively and with precise reference to “what actually happened.” Over the past two decades, however, the very concept of objectivity as a heuristic device for structuring and evaluating past experience has been questioned. Given what some have argued recently about the value of narrative as a structural and evaluative principle for understanding the past, it may be time that we take more seriously these alternative popular histories dismissed as verbal fi ctions by scholars but embraced as meaningful narratives by the people. If, as James Wilkinson argues, history is but a “choice of fi ctions,” then popular historians ought to be seen as of a kind with professionals, and their popular works should command at least some of the attention of scholars for what they tell us about how the past is absorbed by average readers.38 I am aware of the irony that as a professional historian interested in res- urrecting popular histories, I employ the tools of scholarship (explanatory devices, footnotes, bibliographies, etc.) that were developed originally by aca- demics to condemn such “unworthy” texts. I also recognize the risks I run in “academizing” books that were intended for non-academic audiences. As I argue throughout, however, “popular” and “professional” are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms; nor do I think readers favor one approach to the past over another. Though I am a professional historian, I hope that readers will fi nd in my argument an appropriate compromise between appreciation for and criticism of popular rhetorical devices in history. If they do not, then I hope at least that they will come to appreciate why I might be simultaneously attracted to and skeptical of these popular histories. At the very least it seems worth asking why a popular work of the 1880s such as Ridpath’s History of the World had such a life beyond its own time, why it was powerful and resilient enough to have informed the complex worldviews of Thomas Wolfe and Huey Long in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, I hope readers who remain cynical about these texts will at least come to recognize their value for the age in which they were written. If nothing else, historians should contextualize these popular histories as a way of understanding why they were important to nineteenth-century readers. Lawrence Levine, a twentieth-century cultural historian accustomed to thinking of Shakespeare as “fi rmly entrenched in the pantheon of high culture,” recounted his initial resistance to the idea that the playwright’s works constituted 16 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1616 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1612:58:16 PMPM a vibrant form of popular culture in the nineteenth century. “It took a great deal of evidence to allow me to transcend my own cultural assumptions and accept the fact that Shakespeare actually was popular entertainment in nineteenth- century America,” Levine noted. To avoid the contradictions implicit in such a “cultural trap,” he argued, “it was necessary to do what historians should strive to do, however imperfectly they succeed: to shed one’s own cultural skin suf- ﬁ ciently to be able to perceive Shakespeare, as nineteenth -century Americans perceived him, through the prism of the nineteenth century.” I hope in these pages to encourage a similar shedding of cultural skin by twenty-ﬁ rst-century scholars with respect to these nineteenth-century histories. These popular works, though not quite as pervasive in the culture as Shakespeare, were also a form of popular entertainment, sharing in the “language and eloquence, the artistry and humor, the excitement and action, the moral sense and worldview that Americans found in Shakespearean drama.”39 If, as Levine reports, a mid- nineteenth-century canal boatman knew enough about Shakespeare to scream threats at Edwin Forrest as Iago in an Albany, New York, production of Othello, then the names of Bryant, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and Hawthorne were at least familiar enough to American readers in the 1800s to have earned for them the “privilege of criticism” that provided further publicity and in some cases greater popularity for their works.

Deﬁ ning Popular History { 17

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1717 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM In our view, the search for historical truth brings with it not a rejection but rather a greater awareness of the cultural speciﬁ city and the necessary limits of historical knowledge. A self-conscious recognition of the ﬁ ctive elements in historical writing, we argue, strengthens—not weakens—the search for truth.—Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (2005) 1...... When Popular

History Was

Popular

Washington

Irving, George

Lippard, John

Frost, and Book

Culture in the

Nineteenth

Century

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1818 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM Calculated to Strike the Popular Curiosity

In the early winter of 1845, the writer, editor, and literary critic Evert A. Duyckinck was involved in a protracted discussion about the proper direction of American literature with members of a literary circle that he had helped found. Born in Manhattan in 1816, Duyckinck was the son of a bookseller, publisher, and collector of the same name who had been immortalized in Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York as the book peddler “Ever Duckings.” The younger Duyckinck graduated from Columbia Col- lege in 1835 and was admitted to the bar in 1837, although he never practiced law, preferring instead to establish a literary salon in the basement of his 20 Clinton Place home near Washington Square in New York City where writers . and artists could discuss literature and socialize.1 Committed to improving the reputation of American literary fi gures both at home and abroad, he edited and promoted the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and William Gilmore Simms among others. Duyckinck was also active in several periodical publications of high standing, including the Literary World, which he founded and edited with his brother, George, between 1847 and 1853, and Arcturus: A Journal of Books and Opinion, which Poe described as “decidedly the very best magazine in many respects ever published in the United States . . . upon the whole, a little too good to enjoy extensive popularity.” Apart from what Poe’s comment suggests about popular reading tastes in the mid-nineteenth century, it identifi ed correctly Duyckinck’s strong association with the very fi nest “national magazines, national writers and national books” of his age.2 Duyckinck is probably best known today as the co-compiler of the Cyclopae- dia of American Literature (1855), which featured biographical portraits of America’s most prominent writers along with selections from their most important writings.3 Between 1836 and 1855 Duyckinck met regularly in his salon with an emerging New York literati, including the editors and journalists William Alfred Jones, Jedediah B. Auld, Russell Trevett, Cornelius Mathews, and his brother, George Duyckinck.4 The Tetractys Club, as it was known, was described by Poe as a serious intellectual group wholeheartedly committed to altering perceptions about the value of American literature.5 Although he satirized some of the pretentiousness of the group in a widely circulated piece, A Fable for Critics (1848), James Russell Lowell agreed with Poe, referring to Duyckinck as “Our Hero” of national literary projects.6 It was a “fortunate literary visitor” to New York, indeed, who found “his way to the Duyckinck salon in the basement at 20 Clinton Place near Washington Square [to] enjoy cigars, champagne or punch, a good deal of literary talk, and even choice gossip,” Heyward Ehrlich Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 19

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 1919 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM has written.7 Over food and spirits the “Young Americans” as they were later identifi ed, “engineered for the future” by discussing strategies for the shaping of a new literary vision for the nation. In the winter of 1845 the special topic for consideration was a lengthy piece Duyckinck had just published in the American Review titled “The Literary Prospects of 1845,” in which he recommended that two principles should inform an emerging American literary identity: fi rst, literature should be accessible to the people, a condition that required publishers to fi nd ways to market texts more cheaply and widely; and second, such popular works should seek not to imitate European models but to express uniquely American themes in unmistakably American ways.8 With respect to the fi rst of these principles, accessibility, Duyckinck longed for a democratization of literature.9 As early as 1840, Duyckinck had written club member W. A. Jones, urging that American literature “must now be practical for the masses.” One way to achieve this, Jones suggested in an article for Arcturus titled “The Culture of the Imagination,” was to offer obtainable “culture” to Americans in the form of “people’s editions, cheap libraries without end.”10 In response, Duyckinck began negotiations with Wiley and Putnam to produce two compendia of popular works, the Library of Choice Reading and the Library of American Books. The former series featured foreign works, the latter only American, “many of which were original and all of which were paid for on a royalties or lump sum basis.”11 Duyckinck’s extensive correspondence with the numerous authors he consulted as potential contributors to the series—including Emerson, Whittier and Hawthorne—reveals how earnest he was in terms of bringing American literature to the masses.12 In a circular for the forthcoming series, the publishers announced their recognition of “the extent of the reading public in the country” and affi rmed their commitment to a “policy of supplying that public with books at low prices proportioned to the extent.” Books in the United States “must hereafter be cheap,” they announced, adding, “To reconcile the utmost possible cheapness with a proper attention to the literary and mechanical execution of the books published, will be the aim of the publishers in the present series.”13 Issued in paperbound editions at twenty-fi ve to fi fty cents a piece (and sometimes later bound in cloth for a dollar), these books provided solid literature to a much wider audience than had had access to such authors in the past.14 As a result, the publication and circulation of Duyckinck’s libraries represented a signifi cant moment in American book history, one that Ezra Greenspan has referred to as “nothing less than the coming of age of American literary culture.”15 Duyckinck was not the fi rst to envision a widely circulating library of popular texts, of course. Popularizers such as Mason Weems had pursued similar

20 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2020 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM schemes as early as the fi rst years of the nineteenth century. Weems, author of The Life of George Washington (1808), traveled extensively throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Geor- gia, selling his popular biography of Washington along with other “cabinet” works by publisher Mathew Carey of Philadelphia.16 It is estimated that the minister-turned-bookseller peddled tens of thousands of copies of his works that appeared in dozens of editions before his death in 1825. As early as 1797, Weems divulged to publisher Carey his strategy for achieving wide circulation for his library. “Experience has taught me,” he wrote, “that small, i.e. quarter of dollar books, on subjects calculated to strike the Popular Curiosity, printed in very large numbers and properly distributed, w[ould] prove an immense rev- enue to the prudent and industrious Undertakers.”17 In addition, Weems used tricks of showmanship and hucksterism that would have put Huey Long to shame. “Timing his appearances to coincide with county fairs, elections, market days, or other local events,” Cathy Davidson notes, “Weems would enter onto the scene crying out ‘Seduction! Revolution! Murder! as he unveiled his wares.”18 While less fl amboyant, other booksellers such as the former minister Charles Augustus Goodrich and his brother, Samuel G. Goodrich, author of the “Peter Parley” tales, also published and marketed collected sets and libraries of popular histories in the 1820s on the assumption that “a certain revolution in the public taste” was in the offi ng.19 In their bid to become truly popular writers, however, Weems, the Go- odriches and others like them labored under some substantial diffi culties, not the least of which was the price of the books they peddled. Manufacturing and distribution costs were so prohibitive that the regular purchase of books by the general public was simply out of the question. Manually operated presses had not yet given way to more effi cient horse- and steam-driven equipment, and the inking process was still laboriously performed by hand, awaiting the invention of rollers and cylinder presses. Nor was machine-made paper yet available. Booksellers faced enormous obstacles in circulating their volumes extensively, as well, since the geography of the United States in the fi rst third of the nineteenth century did not lend itself readily to mass distribution; the population was large and scattered widely, while the urban centers were small and their markets easily saturated.20 Poor roads, unnavigable river systems and inadequate bridges made it diffi cult for book dealers to hawk their wares, and it was not until the internal improvements of the 1820s and 1830s emerged as well as a nascent railway system that transportation was convenient enough to make wide circulation of books possible. These advances in transportation, when they did fi nally emerge in the 1840s, led to a substantial expansion of literary opportunities in all fi elds. Not Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 21

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2121 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM surprisingly, the fi rst works marketed by publishers were those that required less formal education for comprehension, especially almanacs and works of fi ction. Attracting new readers was the highest priority. Canvassers transported novels from urban bookstores “with uncertain sales prospects” to the very doors of rural readers who, for the fi rst time, were treated to a wide array of classic and popular literature, while new syndicated magazines serialized works of fi ction in ways that increased dramatically the familiarity of such readers with periodical literature of all kinds. Fostering a “climate of readership” was also a big part of the marketing strategy of publishers. Exposure led to habit and habit to addiction. As Paul Gutjahr notes, there was a “reciprocal relationship” between “rising American literacy rates” and “multiplying motivations for the consumption of printed matter,” both of which contributed to the advance of book culture. Writers and readers benefi tted mutually from widening American reading interests, sharing common “desires for economic gain, social distinction, political involvement, and entertainment.”21 Once engaged in any sort of reading activity, even the reading of fi ction, noted one publisher, Americans who had been “destitute entirely of the wisdom” contained in “works of solid information” would become literary creatures with literary needs.22 In an age when reading novels became an acceptable means of gaining access to wider social, political, and intellectual communities, the conventions of literary discourse were important vehicles of cultural exchange. A new legion of readers emerged who demanded stimulating plots, emotional intensity, and liberating creativity in the volumes they read, all of which had signifi cant infl uences on many genres within the popular book market.23 Duyckinck’s circulating libraries benefi tted greatly from these trends, and friends congratulated him on the foresight and commercial instinct he demonstrated in issuing them. “You are now in a situation to do a real service to American Literature,” wrote one admirer, “by opening certain fountains to the public taste which will equally please and purify.”24 Many such popular works marketed by Wiley and Putnam and others were sold by traveling book agents who pedaled these “popular” printed goods door-to-door throughout the United States after the Civil War. Crisscrossing the country with their “salesmen’s dummies” that featured mock-ups of “indispensable” texts to be sold by subscription in “parts,” such vendors circulated novels, self-help manuals and histories to a new constituency of middle-class readers.25 These “cheap and compact” “popular” volumes were produced by national publishing houses that had broken free of exclusive regional markets (such as Harper and Brothers, J. B. Lippincott and Company, and Baker and Scribner) and were part of a revolution in print culture created when the tools of mass production were brought to bear on the challenges of preserving and 22 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2222 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM transmitting information.26 In the eighteenth century, oral communication (sermons, orations and debates) had been the primary means by which Ameri- cans received and circulated intellectual ideas The arrival of a mass-produced, print-bound culture in the mid-nineteenth century, however, meant that more readers gained access more quickly to common information.27 Although the Panic of 1837 caused a temporary reduction in national book sales, by the mid- 1840s Americans were becoming dependent on reading (rather than merely listening) for basic information of all kinds and in ways that produced a boom in the popular book market. Duyckinck’s Library of Choice Reading and the Library of American Books, then, were promoted at a very propitious time, at a cultural moment when, as Duyckinck anticipated, “a taste for reading was diffused by the cheapness of books, and books will continue to be published at low prices.”28 With respect to the second principle outlined in “Literary Prospects of 1845,” the Americanizing of texts, Duyckinck’s ambitions and timing were equally auspicious. “Duyckinck and his friends were champing at the bit for a new kind of American literature,” Edward Widmer has noted. “They tried valiantly to describe what this writing would be like. Like America itself, the new books they expected would be big, reckless, and throughly ‘original,’ to use their most overworked adjective.”29 Following the lead of Emerson, Duyckinck claimed that the mission of creating a national literature required the slough- ing off of European models, since American verse “partakes too much of study and imitation” and is in need of “a national song writer of true lyrical fervor; and indeed, poets in every department, of the true passion.”30 Throughout his literary career, Duyckinck kept extensive logbooks fi lled with protonational- istic passages under the general category “Americanisms” which celebrated the original artistic sensibilities of American writers as against the staid traditions of Europe.31 Duyckinck also collected the names of “American Authors” whose works he compared favorably with those of European counterparts in literature, poetry and drama.32 “America has a great and noble task before her in literature, and we fi rmly believe the power and capacity to do it,” Duyckinck proclaimed on behalf of his literary vision. Her people needed simply to seize “the Time and the Motive” to make it happen.33 Prior to the 1840s, however, the efforts to create an original American literature were hampered not only by the aforementioned technological challenges but by the fact that there was no international copyright law to protect writers from acts of literary piracy. This condition affected what Americans could publish both abroad and at home. Though anxious to make a name for themselves in Europe, American authors had a disincentive to publish in foreign markets since they could not recover royalties for their books without signifi cant effort Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 23

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2323 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM nor prevent the marketing of unauthorized versions of their texts. Conversely, it was the preference of many American publishers to reprint pirated copies of older, established European volumes at very low cost rather than commission authentic new works from American writers.34 The effect of both tendencies, especially the latter, was to discourage American authors from competing in the literary marketplace. To overcome these limitations, members of the Tet- ractys Club initiated a campaign against American publishers who engaged in the “subversive practice” of “reprinting,” especially Harpers, for whom Duyckinck had a “special disdain,” in part because the House of Harper had issued an earlier version of the Library of Choice Reading called Harper’s Family Library, which was “made up of reprints” largely and was therefore “considerably greater in bulk.”35 Harpers admitted that “the present system of publishing . . . was an exclusion of American authors, but they continued the practice because of its obvious fi nancial benefi ts.”36 Later that year Duyckinck and others of his circle organized the American Copyright Club, enlisting the help of eminent fi gures such as the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant, who served as the organization’s fi rst president and who worked tirelessly with the Young Americans to promote fair practices with respect to American writers at home and abroad.37 Among those with whom Duyckinck treated on this issue of copyright was the southern novelist, essayist, and dramatist William Gilmore Simms, whom he invited into the sanctum sanctorum at 20 Clinton Place. Duyckinck and Simms shared a great deal in common in terms of commitments to popular American literature.38 Like Duyckinck, Simms insisted that American texts were too imitative, and he was outspoken in his criticism of native writers who “think after European models, draw their stimulus and provocation from European books, fashion themselves to European tastes, and look chiefl y to the awards of European criticism.” The effect of these misguided allegiances, he wrote, was “to denationalize the American mind” and “to enslave the national heart.” As an alternative, Simms suggested, Americans needed a literary “plant of our own raising,” “true to the spirit of the country” and to “its genuine heart.” The key was to infl uence the popular mind with the belief that a signifi cant American literary presence could aid in the achieving of the national mission. “[S]uch a condition of the popular mind is the precursor of performance,” he argued, “The wish to do, is the forerunner of the way.” If American authors shied away from the responsibility of providing an indigenous literature, he concluded, they “might as well be European,” they “might as well have been born, dwelling and dilating in Middlesex or London.”39 Given the friendship that developed between Duyckinck and Simms on the matter of an American popular literary tradition, it should not be surprising to

24 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2424 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1712:58:17 PMPM learn that Simms was among the fi rst authors Duyckinck commissioned for a volume in the Library of American Books. Published in two series as Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, Simms’s essays focused on a particular aspect of literature in the United States that fascinated both editor and author—the value of history and historical fi ction in the shaping of an American literary identity. Simms believed that historians had a crucial role to play in the cultivation of an American literary sensibility. Episodes from the national past, he reasoned, provided the best resources by which American writers could popularize and legitimize American literature for average readers. Although a relatively unhistoried people, Americans nevertheless had access to a supply of dramatic historical moments that could be exploited for nationalistic purposes. Simms argued, for instance, that American poets and writers might tell the tale of Pocahontas by focusing especially on the crucial moment of her intervention in the ceremonial execution of John Smith. The sad pathos of Ponce de Leon’s quixotic search for immortality in a fountain of youth would make a suitable topic for heroic narrative as well, he noted, or, better still, the tragic wanderings of Hernando de Soto. The instance of national history that Simms thought was most “susceptible of use, even at this early day, by the novelist,” however, was the traitorous betrayal of Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution. “No other series of events, in all that history, seem more naturally to group themselves in the form of a story,” Simms argued, and stories were what popular audiences demanded. The “future poet who thus undertakes his delineation,” Simms noted, will chronicle “the bitterness of a proud heart, denied! The misanthropy, the jaundiced green envy and mortifi cation, discolouring to his mind all the objects of his thought. . . . The temptation follows,—and the fall!” As the title to the keystone essay in Simms’s volumes indicated, narratives such as one chronicling Arnold’s calamitous decline would bear out the crucial value of “The Epochs and Events of American History as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction.”40 Not just any history would suffi ce, of course. In his essay emphasizing the potential of fi ction for teaching the lessons of the past, Simms made clear distinctions between popularizers who he thought could advance Duyckinck’s agenda and scholars who would derail it. He rejected, for instance, those who had perverted the literary past by questioning the interpretive value of events as mythologized in ancient texts. Citing in particular the debunking works of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, author of a three-volume History of Rome completed in the 1830s, Simms condemned the German scholar as part of a “class of modern historians” who were “professed skeptics of all detail in ancient history.” He eschewed those of Niebuhr’s colleagues who insisted on “dry, sapless history” that “tells us nothing,” while ignoring the “fl esh and blood and life” of Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 25

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2525 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM the past. Despite his “learned ingenuity, the keen and vigilant judgment, the great industry, the vast erudition and sleepless research,” Niebuhr was a “cold and impertinent querist” in Simms’s estimation, a petty scholar who had made a “wreck” of “the imposing structure of ancient history, as it comes to us from the hands of ancient art.” Dismissing such a historian as a “dull seeker after bald and isolated facts,” a “digger merely,” Simms insisted on an alternative historical tradition, one that would excite “a just curiosity” and awaken “noble affections” in perceptive students of culture. For Simms, “the chief value of history consists in its proper employment for the purposes of art,” for it is the artist alone who is “the true historian,” the writer “who gives shape to the unhewn fact, who yields relation to the scattered fragments,—who writes the parts in coherent dependency, and endows, with life and action, the otherwise motionless automata of history.”41 For Simms, historical fi ction was the highest expression of truths about the past and the form that promised the most for the emergence of a uniquely American style of literature. Like the fi ction writer, “the historian then must be an artist,” he noted in Views and Reviews, whose prose mirrors the “genius of romance and poetry.” In making his case for a historically grounded literary sensibility in the United States, Simms hoped that American readers had advanced beyond the old “puritanism” by which “it was supposed that romance was a disparagement to history, or led to a perversion of the truth in history.” The public should no longer feel itself “shocked” by a proposed collaborative relationship between fi ction and history, he argued, since the “tendencies of romantic narrative to heighten the taste for history itself” were undeniable. The historian and the novelist were engaged in the same basic activity and aspired to the same high purposes. “If the historian is required to conceive readily, and to supply the motive for human action where the interests of a State or a nation, are concerned,” Simms wrote, “a like capacity must inform the novelist, whose inquiries conduct him into the recesses of the individual heart. Both should be possessed of clear minds, calm, deliberate judgments, a lively fancy, a vigorous imagination, and a just sense of propriety and duty.” In addition, both must be “endowed with large human sympathies, without which neither of them could justly enter into the feelings and affections, the fears and the hopes, of the person whose characters they propose to analyze.” There were subtle distinctions, of course. “If the subject of the historian is one of more dignity and grandeur,” Simms concluded, then “that of the romancer is one of more delicacy and variety.” In general, however, real opportunities existed for historians and historical novelists alike to write “truthful fi ctions” about topics of the greatest “tragic interest.” In the end, “the wit of the novelist enables him to conform his writings more nearly to the form and aspect of 26 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2626 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM events as they really happen” than could the analytic historian dabbling in the dry bones of the past.42 The kinds of “truthful fi ctions” that Simms had in mind pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in terms of historical memory, even in his own day. In calling for the use of history for the purposes of art, Simms reversed the traditional logic of historical investigation which implied that the further removed historians were from the events they described the greater critical distance they could achieve in recounting those events objectively. According to Simms, historical insight decreased over time as subtleties of perspective were lost. Into the void must enter the historical novelist, he noted, who would have free license to use “adroit insinuation” and a more “tractable” set of facts to depart from “absolute history” in ways that “will not offend the spectator some hundred years from now.” Historical memory with respect to the villainy of Benedict Arnold was a case in point. Simms argued that “[w]hen the grandson of the last revolutionary soldier shall be no more,—when the huge folios which now contain our histories and chronicles, shall have given way to works of closer summary and more modern interest,—the artist will fi nd a new form for these events, shape all their features a new, and place the persons of the drama in grouping more appropriate for scenic action.” This might include inventing details in accordance with the “privileges of the prose romancer,” such as allowing Washington to capture and execute Arnold “as, by a similar license, Richmond slays Richard, and Macduff, the usurper of Scotland, in the presence of the audience.” Simms went so far as to suggest that future novelists of the subject might invent the characters they needed to help move the storyline along various subplots that would be most meaningful to the national mission. “You have but to endow Arnold, or his wife, with a sister, who, won by the love of Andre, shall be made the instrument for bringing about the treachery of the hero,” Simms noted, in order to hint that Arnold acted from passion rather than mere treachery. Simms found “no such violations of general truth as should outrage propriety,” in these suggestions; in fact, he argued, “[t]his could be done without coming into confl ict, in the smallest degree, with the written history.”43 As iconoclastic as Simms’s counterfactual historical fi ction appears to our contemporary eyes, most members of Duyckinck’s group accepted its basic literary premises wholeheartedly, at least insofar as they pertained to the rise of historical fi ction. Some of the Young Americans were historical novelists themselves, and they embraced Simms’s assertion that “truthful fi ctions” could be valuable tools for instructing Americans about their collective past.44 Like many nineteenth-century idealists, they shared a basic conviction “that fundamental truths rested in the unseen realm of ideas and spirit,” and they

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 27

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2727 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM believed that “great history, like great art, should entice people beyond the facts toward an appreciation of the higher, poetic imagination.”45 Novelists and poets, then, were described by them as literary forebears of history, “kindred spirits” who prepared the intellectual and artistic ground for the producers of historical narratives.46 While Duyckinck distinguished carefully between facts and fi ction, he argued that historians were essentially storytellers who relied on narrative strategies for the articulation of transcendent themes. He noted in his diary in 1847, for instance, that the French historian Alphonse Lamartine’s “narrative of the fl ight of Louis XVI and the royal family, in his History of the Girondins,” was of such “thrilling interest” because the historian’s “skilful [sic] arrangement of facts do not yield to any fi ction. . . . The novelists have in fact taught the historians to understand their business. Indirectly history is hugely indebted to the author of Waverley.”47 Duyckinck’s reference to the useful abstractions of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels suggests the degree to which he was willing to expand the defi nition of history to accommodate the needs of an idealistic philosophy. Members of Duyckinck’s circle were great admirers of Scott as both novelist and historian. Indeed, in 1838, Duyckinck submitted an essay on the British novelist to The New York Review in which he argued for a more generous interpretation of the value of Scott as both historian and romance writer. Inter- estingly, the article was rejected by the Review’s editor, Caleb Sprague Henry, because it went too far in extolling the virtues of historical romance. “I am no Puritan,” noted Henry, but “many, very many sensible persons, viewing the subject in this light & putting the question in this shape, have unqualifi edly condemned Sir Walter Scott’s career in life as, in the judgment of Reason and Religion, a waste, or an unfaithful use, of his high talent.”48 Simms disagreed with Henry’s decision, of course. Citing the value for history of novelizations that sparked an interest in past events, Simms noted: “It was, for example, only with the publication of Ivanhoe, one of the most perfect specimens of the romance that we possess, that the general reader had any fair idea of the long, protracted struggle for superiority between the Norman and the Saxon people.” Scott’s novel was responsible, he argued, for “the very charming history of the Norman conquest and sway, from the pen of Monsieur Thierry [the nineteenth-century French historian]. In this work, the writer, borrowing something of the attributes of the poet, has contrived to clothe his narrative with an atmosphere which confers upon it a rich mellowness not to be found in the works of the ordinary historian.” As with the infl uence of Shakespeare’s Richard III on the historical writings of Horace Walpole, Simms believed that ancient historical voices “could be made to ring, trumpet like, in a modern ear, by such a lyre as Walter Scott.”49 Revealingly, Simms made this statement 28 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2828 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM with no apparent recognition of the double entendre implicit in its choice of descriptive noun for Scott. These interpretive trends at the heart of Duyckinck’s editorial vision and Simms’s writing underscore the lack of distinction made by the publishers of the Library of American Books between history and romance or fi ction in the mid-nineteenth century.50 History was considered part of the belles lettres, and the literary strategies used by novelists and historians were thought to be very similar in practice. Novels informed by history, such as those written by Sir Walter Scott, were the best-read of all works of fi ction; indeed, some viewed recourse to historical topics as a way of safeguarding against the imaginative excesses of fi ction. In turn, a piece of history that was characterized as “reading like a novel” received the highest praise possible. When Alexander Dumas congratulated Lamartine for having “raised history to the status of a novel,” he did so without the slightest sense of irony.51 The philosopher of history Max Nordau noted that as a young boy his “real affi nities” were with the historical novel in which the “melodramatic past” reigned supreme and in which readers were encouraged to indulge their “inborn” and perpetual “love of stories.” The most important historical works of his youth were “picturesque” narratives of adventure that drew inspiration from the Thousand and One Nights rather than Bancroft, histories that were “full of tragedies, dramas, comedies of character and intrigue.” According to Nordau, such histories differed from fairy tales primarily in their “piquant attempt to prove that everything did actually happen as it is set down.” The only meaningful distinction between the historian and the novelist, he argued, “is that the invention of the former is limited in regard to the facts of which a recognized version is current”; other than that, Nordau concluded, “there is no exaggeration in saying that history as it is written is a kind of roman à thèse novel.”52 Part of the ease of transference between fi ctional and historical modes of thinking as articulated by Simms, Duyckinck and others was conditioned by the subdued role played by “facts” in historical narratives in the mid-nineteenth century. With the exception of some almanac compilers and annalists, most historians of the period did not consider themselves mere stockpilers of details nor bound by facts; rather, they viewed these as the bare platforms on which important narrative structures could be assembled. As David Levin has argued persuasively with regard to mid-century historians, “whatever value facts had for their own sake, it was the story, and the kind of story, that counted.”53 In this sense, historical meaning was “constructed” and was presumed to inhere not so much in the facts associated with an historical episode as in the ways facts were organized.54 Facts were not irrelevant, of course, since historians were restricted in their narratives to events that took place at specifi c times

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 29

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 2929 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM and spaces while writers of fi ction were not. Even the nonconformist Simms would acknowledge that self-respecting historians of the nineteenth century did not willfully invent characters, occurrences, or dialogues the way novelists do. Apart from these subtle distinctions, however, the aims of historians and fi ction writers were presumed to be virtually the same. Both were storytellers who had to meet criteria of “correspondence and coherence in their accounts,” and both relied heavily on the power of the imagination to structure experience. The “conventional distinction between the two realms underestimated the constraints on the writer of fi ction and overestimated those on the historian,” Peter Novick has noted of the period. Historical stories, like all others narratives, were thought to be “made rather than found.”55 Given these points of convergence, it was assumed by many in Duyckinck’s circle that the best training a historian could obtain as preparation for the popular book market was as an imaginative writer of fi ction. Since both historical and fi ctional meaning were understood to be “constructed” in a literary sense, narrative, the art of storytelling, was recognized as lying at the heart of each enterprise. This sentiment helps explain why both historians and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century were preoccupied with the substance and style of the stories they were telling, whether cautionary tales or prescriptions for moral uplift.56 To the extent that there was any consistency in the subject matter of these literary works, it was in their shared interest in the Great Story or the master narrative of history.57 Historical novelists and writers of history organized many of their texts around the same central ideas of progress, nationalism or the battle of reason over superstition.58 In addition, what novelists and historians consistently excluded from their narratives (such as the stories of repressed minorities) also revealed by indirection and obfuscation common strategies of design.59 Style proved remarkably consistent with respect to both historical novels and works of history marketed by the Young Americans and others. In fact, so crucial to historical writing were technical matters of literary presentation—character development, descriptive strategies, tone, point of view, rules of evidence, etc.—that Duyckinck conceived of history as essentially synonymous with highly personalized literary art. In criticizing Machiavelli’s History of Florence, Duyckinck regretted that the author had not included more “personal matter” in his text. “Where public affairs are so uniform how brilliantly he might have lit up the narrative by the detail of personal history,” the editor noted in his diary. “His preservation of the dignity of history is absolutely painful.”60 Popular historical literature of the mid-nineteenth century must be idiosyncratic and personal, borrowing heavily from the rhetorical devices common to imaginative fi ction if necessary. According to George Callcott, “[s]weeping

30 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3030 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM the reader up into the narrative” obligated historians to use “natural words, simple expression, and concrete images” derived from their personal lives, which, in turn, placed a premium on the “direct language, strong verbs, and everyday expressions” used by novelists.61 Even the standards for “truth” in history as established by Duyckinck were determined by rhetorical considerations, as history was expected to do more than merely report; it was expected to edify. Truth was not synonymous with fact alone, but with a combination of fact and imagination.62 Rational thought and creative literary expression (substance and style) were viewed symbiotically by Simms, who valued them as equal partners in the historian’s task of defi ning moral truth. He applied the romantic conventions of current literature to real historical episodes in an effort to make history accountable to contemporary moral standards.63 These sentiments suggest why the “men of letters” in whom Simms and Duyckinck placed the most faith for the creation of a unique American literary tradition had been writers of fi ction before they were historians.64 Parkman produced a novel long before he completed work on his epic North America series; John Lothrop Motley wrote two novels; and Prescott borrowed unabashedly from the romantic literary conventions of the novelists of his day, making extensive use of standardized narrative themes (the Past, Nature, and the Great Man in History) as well as traditional tropes of fi ction (irony, tragedy, comedy).65 Appreciation for the literary gifts of these writers was especially strong among publishers such as Wiley and Putnam, who worked hard (and unsuccessfully) to convince Francis Parkman to contribute a volume to the Library of American Books. It is revealing, however, that when the two publishers split their fi rm in the winter of 1848, Parkman was one of the fi rst authors signed by acquisition editors of the new concern, G. P. Putnam & Company. The success of The Oregon Trail seemed to verify Putnam’s faith in the value of good historical prose literature for popular readers.66 In the Cyclopaedia of American Literature, Duyckinck later noted that another work by Parkman, The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), “attracted attention by its individuality of subject, respect by its evidences of thorough investigation, and popularity by its literary merits.” Because his volumes were written “in a clear, animated tone, giving its pages due prominence to the picturesque scenery as well as the dramatic action of its topic,” Parkman “attained a foremost rank as a historian.”67 By this standard, Prescott was even more a master of prose style. His Conquest of Mexico (1843), Duychinck argued, was “effective and popular, comprehending that series of military adventures, which read more like a cruel romance than the results of sober history.”68 Conversely, the inability to write with the imagination of a good novelist often doomed the careers of would-be historians in the eyes of Duyckinck.

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3131 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM Samuel Eliot was a sad case in point. Enrolled at Harvard at the age of thirteen, Eliot had graduated fi rst in an impressive class that included Edward Everett and of which he was the youngest member, having displayed a particular ap- titude for historical study. After a Gibbonesque epiphany while traveling in Rome in the early 1840s, and with encouragement from his boyhood friend and neighbor, Francis Parkman, Eliot determined to write a history of liberty from the classical era to the present. His research was exhaustive and his arguments sound, and Duyckinck acknowledged that if viewed as “critical analysis” rather than as “narrative” it possessed a certain “philosophical acumen” and bore “evidences of a diligent study of the original and later authorities.”69 A few readers even appreciated the “moral dignity” of the work, applauding its recognition of the “religious sense of the dealings of Providence with the history of man.”70 Eliot’s The History of Liberty was panned by most critics, however, for showing none of the “creative power,” imagination, or stylistic genius of the historical novelists of his day. “In undertaking the history of liberty,” Harvard professor Barrett Wendell later noted, Eliot “mistook literary ambition for capacity,” failing to recognize that popular historical writing “demands special gifts which he never quite revealed.”71 If training as a novelist was considered the best kind of preparation for the writing of history, then the study of poetry was a close second. For centuries poems had been appreciated as favored vehicles for conveying historical truths.72 The imaginative and even mystical elements of the poetic were considered meaningful devices for encouraging an appreciation for the past.73 This logic appears counterintuitive to us today, since we have come to believe that poets work “deductively,” employing patterns that predate subject matter and are imposed on it, while historians develop narrative devices in an inductive manner, derived from facts and “found” in the data.74 But as Hayden White and others have suggested, many of the literary conventions employed by historians are “pre-generic” and derive from archetypal and epic forms.75 That is, historians, like all those who use language in the service of explanation, are conditioned by the structural properties of linguistic forms, which are themselves poetic.76 Simms anticipated these comments when he asked rhetorically of the kind of poetry that “furnishes the perfect history”: “Shall we consider it less true because it is attested in the underlying measures of verse!”77 For Duyckinck, the answer was a defi nitive “No!” These assumptions about the relationship between the disciplines of history and literature explain why Duyckinck could confl ate so readily all these forms into one common statement of purpose for American ambitions with respect to literature. In “Literary Prospects of 1845,” Duyckinck wrote: “We would urge it for every department of literature; stimulating the historian to 32 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3232 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1812:58:18 PMPM profounder research, the poet to a more concentrated self-knowledge and a more truthful pursuit of nature, the novelist to acquire that spirit of art which is both an incentive and restraint to his powers.” The tasks of the historian, poet and novelist might even be subsumed in the career of a single individual, a jack-of-all literary trades who could accomplish remarkable feats of intellectual consolidation. Embedded language in the correspondence between Simms and Duyckinck as well as in the latter’s “Literary Prospects of 1845” reveals something undeniably messianic in their search for a new poet-novelist- historian who could elicit the “spiritual and eternal” elements of an emerging American literature. Such a literary savior would be a “humble man” who would not “bray his affairs constantly before the world” like those false proph- ets who send their “noisy nostrums through the street with trumpet and plac- ard at all hours,” Duyckinck wrote. Instead, he would be an “invisible angel who appears only seldom, but then in great beauty, at the life-giving sacred Bethesda.” If the literary marketplace was a rough-and-tumble arena in which the “children of light” suffered needless obscurity, there was still hope that the true “man of letters,” the “One” who tirelessly “devotes his time and talents to the improvement of society,” might emerge. Would 1845 be the year of this Savior’s coming? Duyckinck hoped so. “There is a new year opening of the Christian Era;” he proclaimed. “[L]et it be so indeed, and like Boniface’s ale, savor of the Anno Domini!”78

History as Gentle, Romantic Fiction

If a populist prophet of a new American literary kingdom were to appear in the mid-1840s, Duyckinck and Putnam expected that he (not she in their estimation) might emerge from the already established community of popular artists of proven reputation.79 It is true that members of the Young America movement often looked for inspiration beyond the elders of the fi rst school of American literary acolytes whom they typecast as too European in outlook, supporting instead the careers of younger authors more closely affi liated with indigenous American styles.80 We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that Young Americans used the standards of the old as the measure for determining the worthiness of the new. Hence, Duyckinck acknowledged in the Cyclopaedia the value of old standard works in the fi eld of history such as Wil- liam Cullen Bryant’s poem “Song of Marion’s Men,” which evoked a “national and patriotic sentiment” and was “expressive of the heroic in character.”81 Na- thaniel Hawthorne’s contributions to historical literature were also viewed as signifi cant, though limited largely to biographies of public fi gures (such as that

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 33

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3333 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM of his college friend Franklin Pierce) and to short stories collected in volumes such as True Stories from History, designed simply “to give pleasure to ‘the 82 YOUNG.’ ” Importantly, Duyckinck noted, the historical works of Bryant and Hawthorne had a wide appeal because they borrowed so deliberately and successfully from the techniques of persuasion evident in popular poetry and fi c- tion. Putnam recruited both men for the Library of American Books because the poet and the novelist each had developed proven strategies that recognized “the value of reader involvement in the past, the value of the particular and the exotic, [and] the value of local color and precise detail.” Americans demanded as much romanticism “from their historians as they obtained from their novelists,” Callcott has noted, and they found it in the “drum and trumpet” historical pieces perfected by Bryant and Hawthorne.83 James Fenimore Cooper was slightly more active than either Hawthorne or Bryant as a historian, writing a multivolume History of the Navy that Simms celebrated as “a noble instance” of a “hearty” patriotism that revealed the novelist to be “an equally good critic and historian.”84 Francis Parkman, a great admirer of Natty Bumppo and other “breathing men” in Cooper’s fi ction, found in Cooper’s histories a commitment to historical portraiture not unlike that of Sir Walter Scott. “Their conceptions of character were no mere abstract ideas, or unsubstantial images,” Parkman wrote, “but solid embodiments in living fl esh and blood.”85 Duyckinck agreed, adding that Cooper’s novels constituted an especially important contribution to historical understanding of Native Ameri- cans. As the “novels of Scott set the antiquaries to work rubbing the rust off old armor, and brushing the dust from many an old folio, and illustrating many a well-nigh forgotten chapter of history,” Duyckinck noted, so “the productions of Cooper have rendered a like service. He has thrown a poetic atmosphere around the departing race of the Red men, which, if it cannot stay their destiny, will do much to fi x their place in history.”86 Yet it is revealing that Duyckinck did not recruit Cooper for his popular libraries, in part because he did not feel that Cooper’s Native Americans rang true, having the aura about them at times of Shakespearean actors delivering Elizabethan soliloquies. Historical romances such as those in the Leatherstocking series did not meet the standards of authenticity for popular history established by Duyckinck for American writers. There was a sense among the Young Americans that Cooper’s histories and historical novels recycled tired themes with too much regularity. The fi rst volume of Arcturus, for instance, featured a review of Cooper’s Deerslayer in which Cooper’s historical treatments of Native Americans were characterized as “[a]n exhausted vein of writing from which the ore has long disappeared.”87 The desire to achieve both popularity and authenticity suggested the diffi - culties faced by writers of historical literature in the popular book market who

34 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3434 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM wished to realize Duyckinck’s “literary prospects” for an extensive reconsid- eration of historical literature in the United States. Not everyone who aspired to reach a wider reading audience was anxious to embrace Duyckinck’s larger agenda of a systematic treatment of national themes in a broad-based popular historical literature. Neither Cooper nor Hawthorne chose to write a Popular History of the United States, for instance; they picked at its edges only, leaving comprehensive synthetic treatments to others. Such resistance to the universalizing impulses of Duyckinck suggests a good deal about the varieties of the popular emerging in the 1840s. For reasons that relate to the complexities of the popular book market and to the distractions of competing literary projects in an expanding fi eld, writers such as Cooper never acted on impulses to tell the nation’s history in its entirety in popular formats. It is diffi cult to document precisely when the genre of popular history emerged as a fi xed and steady feature of the American literary scene, but prior to the 1840s bibliographic aids indicate that Americans had not yet recognized works of the order Duyckinck imagined as part of a distinct category of literature.88 Of all the established literary and poetic fi gures who dabbled in history writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Washington Irving came closest to embodying the spirit of the wide-reaching and comprehensive popularity that Duyckinck advocated and that defi ned the genre in its later nineteenth-century iterations. Though of different generations, Duyckinck Jr. and Irving were the closest of friends. They met regularly in social settings and agreed on most things literary. Duyckinck admired the playfulness of Irving’s fi rst substantial literary production, Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807), for instance, which was written in “so agreeable a style,” in Duyckinck’s estimation, “that it is still read with interest, what was piquant gossip then being amusing history now.” Even more he appreciated the patriotic purposes Irving served in telling the history of the early Republic in literary tales and folklore. “Parallel with the ruder but more robust and athletic writings of Cooper,” Duyckinck noted, “the volumes of Irving improved Amer- ican society, and rendered the national name beloved and respected abroad.”89 His reverence for Irving as a cultural ambassador bordered on fi liopiety. It was Duyckinck who oversaw many of the funeral arrangements when Irving died in 1859, and Duyckinck who took responsibility for compiling a collection of “anecdotes and traits,” a Festschrift of sorts entitled Irvingiana, to commemorate the life of this American literary genius.90 So enamored of Irving was Duyck- inck, in fact, that he was buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York, next to Irving, where the two had selected sites together years before.91 For Duyckinck, Irving represented a complex and signifi cant example of the crossover value of the disciplines of history and literature. While best known for

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 35

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3535 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM his works of regional and historical fi ction, especially short stories such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving wrote many volumes of popular history which, collectively, treated nearly all of the most signifi cant episodes and personages in seventeenth- and eighteenth -century American history. Some of these, such as the farcical History of New York, blurred the distinctions between fact and fi ction. Playing with the persona of historian as “truth-giver,” Irving’s fi ctional narrator of Dutch and British colonists in New York, Diedrich Knickerbocker, insisted that he was “particularly anxious that his work should be noted for its authenticity; which is, indeed, the very life and soul of history.” Almost in the same breath, however, Knickerbocker suggested to his readers that, as a historian, he had certain “advantage[s]” over them. “[T]hough I cannot save the life of my favorite hero, nor absolutely con- tradict the event of the battle (both which liberties, though often taken by the French writers of the present reign, I hold to be utterly unworthy of a scrupulous historian), yet I can now and then make him bestow on his enemy a sturdy backstroke suffi cient to fell a giant; though, in honest truth, he may never have done anything of the kind,” Irving’s narrator noted. Professing a profound respect for the sanctity of the past and the awesome responsibilities of the historian—who, as “sovereign censor,” has the power to confer “immortality” on subjects or consign them to inglorious “neglect”—Knickerbocker nonetheless admitted to taking liberties with the historical record for the sake of literary effect. As compensation, however, he assured readers that he had agonized over the “direful commotions and calamities” such practices occasioned.92 Duyckinck admired Irving’s willingness to embellish historical facts as a way of achieving a poetic feeling for seventeenth-century Dutch life in New York. In the Cyclopaedia he noted that Irving turned to good account the “humorous capabilities of the subject . . . in the happiest way, the fun being broad enough not to be confounded with the realities.” Admittedly, occasional questions about the verisimilitude of events described in the Knickerbocker History led to misunderstandings among readers about the intentions of its author. One “venerable clergyman” complained that, having begun “the work in good faith,” he was “only gradually warmed to a consciousness of the joke,” Duyck- inck noted, while Irving’s work “was gravely held up to reprehension” in an address before the New-York Historical Society by another deceived patron. Irving’s popular books were of substantial enough breadth to admit of several types of historical treatment, Duyckinck argued, both as a lofty subject handled with vulgarity and as “a system of original investigation and historical inquiry.” If scholars objected to Irving’s incongruous style, he added, they “should have occupied the ground earlier, and not have given the fi rst advantage to the humorist.”93 The historian John Spencer Bassett was perhaps most accurate with 36 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3636 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM respect to contemporary assessments when he said of the Knickerbocker His- tory: “It was confessedly a burlesque,” recognized as such even in its own day, “but it was written with such a clear insight into the character of the Dutch settlers that it gave its readers a fairly acceptable impression of their lives and mental attitude. It was widely read and stimulated interest in real history.”94 This was the kind of authentically American vision that members of the Young America movement could embrace. Others of Irving’s popular works fell more squarely into the category of traditional, archival history that Duyckinck also admired. In the 1820s Irving took a trip to Spain with the intention of publishing documents related to Columbus’s voyages uncovered by the historian Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete. American publishers were lukewarm to the project, however, suspecting that there would be little market for a mere work of translation. Admit- ting to himself that the “sight of disconnected papers and ofﬁ cial documents is apt to be repulsive to the general reader, who seeks for clear and continued narrative,” Irving decided as an alternative to write a popular biography of Columbus based on his extensive research in the historical records. He spent the next twenty-one months laboring over historical materials, producing a substantial work, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in three volumes, that deﬁ ned Columbiana studies for years to come.95 The most enduring parts of the narrative, according to fellow historian William Prescott, were those in which Irving used his considerable skills as a writer to elucidate topics that were “full of sublimity,” such as the moment of the “great discovery.” Irving’s treatment of the landing of Columbus was “a model topic for investigation,” Prescott concluded, demonstrating an easy convergence of literary and historical talents that “Irving had performed with enviable skill.”96 Much to Irving’s delight, the volumes were commercially successful and well received by general readers.97 The success of Life of Columbus has concerned some modern historiographers who have noted Irving’s tendencies to embellish or alter materials for the sake of desired literary effects.98 There is no question that Irving violated principles that historians view as sacred today. Claudia Bushman points out, for instance, that Irving “manipulated the facts he found for romantic purposes” as when he “jumped at [an] earlier date” than most scholars allowed for Columbus’s birth as a way of dramatizing the midlife crisis implications of his voyages. “I think all the actions of Columbus, his perseverance, his for- titude, his undaunted enterprises, receive wonderful additional force from his advanced age,” Irving reasoned. Bushman adds that when Irving found a source he preferred, “he was willing to dismiss others that did not suit him.”99 This was especially true of Irving’s description of Columbus’s serendipitous

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 37

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3737 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM landfall in the Americas during his fi rst voyage. Despite the fact that there were few reliable sources that recorded the disposition of those who went ashore in October 1492, Irving favored the most romantic of these. “The feelings of the crew now burst forth in the most extravagant transport,” he wrote. “They thronged around the admiral with overfl owing zeal, some embracing him, others kissing his hands. Those who had been most mutinous and turbulent during the voyage, were now most devoted and enthusiastic.” Irving’s description of Columbus’s men as supplicating advanced his larger goal of promoting Co- lumbus as a “great man in history” in the sense that Carlyle used the phrase. “Some begged favors of him, as if he had already wealth and honors in his gift. Many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now croached at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him, promising the blindest obedience in the future.”100 Similar objections have been raised to Irving’s treatment of Columbus’s triumphant return to Barcelona after the fi rst voyage. According to Bushman, Irving largely invented the scene, picturing “the kind of reception Columbus should have had” rather than the more subdued affair he did experience.101 A contemporary reviewer for the Monthly Review picked up on these distorting tendencies, which he attributed to Irving’s misplaced desire to sentimental- ize Columbus, “who seemed to him more like the hero of an historical novel than the object of a serious historical inquiry.”102 Irving responded to such criticisms by condemning iconoclasts like those at the Monthly Review who seemed to take pleasure in “marring and mutilating” the reputations of signifi - cant historical fi gures. For Irving, the popularizing of Columbus was part of a larger national agenda affi rming the master narrative of Progress. “There is a certain meddlesome spirit, which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down monuments,” Irving noted, adding that “care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition” because “it defeats one of the most salutary purposes of history, that of furnishing examples of what human genius and laudable enterprise may accomplish.”103 Put differently, Irving was tolerant of slight adjustments to the historical record of a sort made necessary in order to place “the individual at the center of the universe.”104 At the heart of the disagreement was a debate over what constituted proper historical technique. His critics worried about the implications of manipulating evidence for the sake of creating a “transcendent Columbus.” Reviewers at the London Weekly Review were more accepting of Irving’s literary strategies, ranking the author as “among the ablest historians of [his] age.” The New York Mirror agreed, noting that Irving “had turned to great advantage his movement toward serious history, although no one could have expected that development.”105 The literary agent Alexander 38 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3838 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM Everett claimed that Irving had “brought out the full force of his genius as far as a just regard for the principles of historical writing would admit.”106 As might be predicted, Duyckinck and his circle were more disposed toward the New York Mirror’s reactions to Irving than to those of the Monthly Review. By and large the Young Americans accepted Irving’s sense of narrativity with respect to a more politicized vision of how the past might serve as pro- logue to the present. To understand his histories properly, Duyckinck wrote in reference to Irving, we must “penetrate to the motives and opportunities of the . . . grand results,” which encourage us “to increase and magnify our own parts in the ever-acting drama.” Compounding details the way a novelist constructs a complicated plot, Irving “put in everything he could fi nd and added more besides.” He imaginatively recreated the life of Columbus by conceiv- ing “new details to fl esh out his scenes in dramatic and colorful ways and to weave together his historical episodes,” according to Duyckinck. In addition, he “borrowed from others, concentrating on the idealized fi gure of Columbus, enhancing the humorous and picturesque details.” His readers were familiar with the essential details of Columbus’s story, Duyckinck admitted, but Irving “shaped and colored the events” in ways that made his “nonfi ction narrative read more like a gentle romantic fi ction than a history.”107 The style was “orna- mental and gaudy and meretricious,” to be sure, as one of Irving’s publishers acknowledged, “but the Life was also a beautiful story, gracefully told, always smooth, always dignifi ed.”108 Duyckinck asserted in the Cyclopaedia that Ir- ving’s histories were “marked by the same genial and poetic treatment” as his novels, “the fancy of the writer evidently luxuriating in the personal freedom of movement of his heroes, their humor of individual character, and the warm oriental coloring of the theme.”109 Some critics in Duyckinck’s day, such as those at the Monthly Review, believed that Irving’s attempts to write popular biographies of Columbus and Washington were “common” and “undistinguished,” but most found them romantic and provocative and expected they would stand the test of time. Irving’s literary portraits seemed typical of a genre that was concerned more with recovering the pervasive spirit of an age than with accuracy of minute detail. Irving was less interested in chronicle than in storytelling, less concerned with “trivial truth than with fertile error.”110 The novel and the epic poem were suitable prototypes for this kind of recuperative vision, according to Duyck- inck, since Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Bryant were all interested in dis- covering what people were thinking and doing in the past, concerns that led them back to narrative forms.111 Operating from the assumption that history should be didactic, Irving and other novelists-turned-historians constructed stories that offered moral visions to a nation in need of guidance. For them,

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 39

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 3939 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM popular history was a “moral science” whose task was not so much to recreate the past for its own sake as to convey an appreciation for the way in which history could be used to encourage an ethically responsible present. 112 The narrative and poetic forms into which these visions were translated eventually achieved cultural familiarity and approximated the status of myths. It was the rhetorical quality of the mythic-historical constructions promoted by popularizers that provided the most direct avenues to historical meaning. If you could tell the story well, Duyckinck believed, you could awaken readers to the true signifi cance of history; if you could not, then no amount of reliance on verifi able fact could salvage the inevitable wreckage of the enterprise. “One still hears of histories ‘nearly as entertaining as a novel,’ of histories ‘almost as interesting as fi ction,’ ” the poet Edwin Markham noted in defense of such literary approaches to the past. “But if these statements are true, how can we account for the public’s unmistakable preference for the modern story-teller, the novelist?”113

Popular History as Fictional Embellishment

Duyckinck’s support of writers-turned-historians, such as Irving, had a marked infl uence over the entire industry of popular history, especially among relatively unknown practitioners. At fi rst glance it would seem incongruous, perhaps, to argue that the promotion of an internationally recognized writer with a reputation as a highbrow such as Irving could spark a revolution in historiography among the masses, but Duyckinck’s infl uence on popular markets was considerable. Irving was not available to contribute to the Library of American Books, but he inspired Duyckinck and others of the Tetractys group to solicit works by other popular writers. “While the Young America movement was always an elitist undertaking—its founding members a group of affl uent litterateurs who had formed themselves into an exclusive private association,” Meredith McGill has noted, “their rhetoric distinguished itself at the start by its populism.”114 Theirs was a project dedicated to exposing the American reading public to a wide array of popular works at small expense, not just essays and poetry as the advertisements for the Library of Choice Read- ings indicated but “contributions to History” as well.115 Historical fi ction and popular history were among those works projected for an expanded series of popular books called the Home Library, to be edited by Duyckinck for I. S. Platt publishers in New York City. The popular historian J. T. Headley contributed a volume on Italian history which sold for twelve and a half cents.116 In addition, the editor’s correspondence with publisher G.P. Putnam suggests

40 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4040 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:1912:58:19 PMPM that historians who contributed to the Library of American Books were deeply grateful to Duyckinck for rescuing “works which had been suffering under neglect in this country” and affording “unwonted encouragement to native authors by publishing their books, in good style and in good company, without the trouble or risk to the authors themselves, and in the very teeth of the disad- vantages arising from the want of an international copyright law.”117 In the 1840s and 1850s, dozens of histories intended for the masses exploded onto the market. The rise of “popular history” as an independent genre began during this period with the emergence of general, comprehensive histories of the United States that self-identifi ed as “popular.” Produced by writers, journalists and poets with less well-established reputations than the aforementioned novelists-turned-historians (authors such as Benson Lossing, David Pae, and Mary Botham Howitt), these works shared the commitment of Irving and others to literary embellishment and rhetorical effect.118 If one consults bibliographic sources from the nineteenth century treating historical literature—J. N. Larned’s Literature of American History, for instance—one fi nds dozens of listings for popular works that advertise themselves not merely as “complete narrative histories” of the sort found in “historical compendi- ums” but also as collections of “interesting tales and episodes” intended to have an enduring impact on the historical imagination.119 Barnes’ Popular His- tory of the United States declared unabashedly that American history constituted “a narrative so full of picturesque incident and romantic adventure” that it must without exception “sweep the reader along as if by charm and fascination.”120 As a way of increasing its “literary quality,” Mabie’s Popular History of the United States was organized topically around short romantic narratives (such as the “Story of the Indian” or the “Story of the Negro”) rather than chronologically according to more rigid sequential concerns.121 Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, such popular histories competed with each other in the literary marketplace in intense and meaningful ways.122 Part of the success of popular histories with American readers of the mid- nineteenth century was related to the reasonable prices of such works. In the 1830s, few would-be buyers, particularly in remote areas, could afford to purchase books on popular history by subscription, not knowing how many “parts” they might be obliged to take and what their disposable incomes might be in a wildly fl uctuating economy. The leather-bound offerings of patrician historians were equally out-of-reach. Whereas a series such as George Bancroft’s History of the United States cost nearly twenty-fi ve dollars to purchase and was released piecemeal over fi ve decades, a multivolume work intended for mass audiences such as John Frost’s expeditious Popular History cost only fi ve dollars, was far easier reading, and was more widely circulated Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 41

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4141 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM than Bancroft’s.123 In their various editions, such histories sold more than fi fty thousand copies, rivaling the works of Irving and establishing new commercial opportunities for the genre of popular history.124 Publishers understood that popular artists must submit to the laws of supply and demand and were dependent on proven strategies for winning the largest possible audience in the marketplace. 125 Popular histories by Joel T. Headley, John Warner Bar- ber, and Jacob Abbott each had their own idiosyncrasies, to be sure, but they all relied on standardized literary devices tested in the marketplace to structure highly patriotic and unifying narratives.126 They all told stories that conformed to agreed-upon conventions for narrating the part, including patterns of causal sequencing, historical explanation, and character assessment. 127 The success of these popular histories was also predicated on the literary abilities of their authors. Here again, experience as a historical novelist was considered the best sort of training for achievement in this highly competitive marketplace. These “historians without portfolio” understood that since history was a branch of literature, it must be readable in order to be serviceable.128 Popular writers of reputation like Benson Lossing established the “compelling phrases, images, and narratives” by which Americans chose to remember (and sometimes suppress) national experience. The historical novel provided the literary elements by which popular historians were able to structure their particular historical formulations, especially those associated with the grand narrative of American exceptionalism and its subplots related to liberty and freedom.129 In this context it is important to recognize, as Dan Nathan notes, that “for many readers the pasts that novels construct are more vibrant, compelling, and infl uential than those found in histories. In this way novels frequently wield considerable power in shaping popular understandings of the past.”130 If such writers relied on historical techniques at odds with established scholarly practice, they nonetheless established the prevailing patterns of interpretation by which most Americans remembered and passed judgment on history.131 Theodore Roosevelt, a writer of history himself before he was a public servant, put it this way: “Historians who did not write well were unlikely to be remembered”; indeed, they “would not only be forgotten, their ideas would be forgotten with them.”132 That was a fate that popular historians wished to avoid at all costs. The careers of many different nineteenth-century authors might be invoked to demonstrate the characteristics of this emerging literary marketplace for popular history, but the works of two such historians—George Lippard and John Frost—should suffi ce to suggest its primary features. Lippard, who began his career as a novelist, was in prime position to take advantage of the market forces that contributed to the emergence of popular history as a distinct 42 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4242 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM genre. Though little known today, Lippard has been described as “America’s most widely read novelist” of the period between the mid-1840s and the mid- 1850s, and “one of the most fantastic creatures in the whole American literary menagerie.”133 In 1844 he published The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, a popular exposé of urban life in Philadelphia which sold 60,000 copies in its fi rst year and went through 27 editions over the next fi ve years.134 The novel revealed Lippard’s slightly off-center outlook on social reform, exposing the debauchery of social elites who collected money from honest citizens for “causes” only to spend it on alcohol, drugs, and women for themselves. Middle-class readers with concerns about the pretenses of many upper-class writers appreciated the work’s subversive and irreverent message. One contemporary of Lippard’s noted: “It was his business to attack social wrongs, to drag away purple garments, and expose to our shivering gaze the rottenness of vice—to take tyranny by the throat and strangle it to death.”135 In part owing to Lippard’s unusual ability to express political rage in the context of class anxieties and a compelling narrative, Larzer Ziff estimates that The Quaker City was “the most popular novel in America prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and that Lippard outsold Hawthorne and Melville in the decade of the 1850s.136 Lippard followed this success with “historical fi ctions and legends” related to war, including a Revolutionary War novel of wide circulation, Blanche of Brandywine (1846), as well as Bel of Prairie Eden (1848), which treated the Mexican War. He also produced Legends of Mexico: The Battles of Taylor (1847), which, though advertised as a “faithful history” of the struggle to achieve independence for Texas, has been described more accurately as containing “only a thin veneer of historical fact.” Among other things, Lippard borrowed freely from the various “Gothic devices” he had used in Quaker City and other novels, including “ghostly apparitions, seduction, murder, and so on,” which revealed, in the estimation of one reviewer, an inability to distinguish between “history and romance.” The distinctions were not particularly meaningful to Lippard. He defi ned “legend” in this text as “history in its details and delicate tints, with the bloom and dew yet fresh upon it, history told to us, in the language of passion, of poetry, of home!”137 These doubts aside, Lippard’s works sold, and their popularity suggests the ease with which he moved from fi ction to history in the popular book market. Such interchangeability also reveals the recognition by American readers that both history and fi ction shared a common entertainment purpose. In an age when more than a third of the nation’s best-selling books were historical, Lippard managed to stay at the top of best seller lists with almost everything he wrote, fi ction and nonfi ction alike.138 The symbiotic relationship between fi ction writing and historical investigation is best evidenced, perhaps, by an anecdote that Lippard was fond of

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 43

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4343 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM recounting. In 1847, Lippard liked to tell, he was visited by a discharged soldier who had served recently under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. Their conversation centered on a work of history Lippard had published earlier that year—Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution—in which the author drew parallels between the heroism of the Revolutionary fathers and the valiant soldiers fi ghting to preserve liberty in Mexico. “The children of the Revolution and countrymen of Washington, are thronging the vallies [sic], darkening the mountains of this land, bearing in their front amid a tide of sword and bayonet the Banner of Stars,” he had written, “from the bloody height of Bunker Hill, from the meadow of Brandywine, to the snow-clad height of Orizaba and the golden city of Tenochtitla.” Lippard’s words had found a receptive audience. His visitor informed him that a serialized version of Washington and His Generals had reached soldiers fi ghting in Mexico and that they had been inspired by its message.139 “Gathered round our watch-fi re before the battle of Monterey, one of our number seated on a cannon, would read while the others listened,” the soldier told Lippard. Washington’s acts of valor “made our hearts feel warm—they nerved our arm[s] for battle! When we read of the old times of our Flag, we swore in our hearts, never to disgrace it.” This battlefi eld report not only suggested the wide reach of Lippard’s writings, it also confi rmed his belief that historians could infl uence the present by narrating the lessons of the past. He promised to continue to do his part to shed light on “the awful shadows of the Past” by introducing readers to “some of the brightest gleams of poetry and romance, that illumine our history.”140 As was increasingly typical in the 1840s, Lippard’s Washington and His Generals was distributed through a series of subsidiary booksellers and literary agents throughout the South and West within a matter of weeks.141 His book agents became more sophisticated in their techniques for penetrating hard to reach markets as well. Manuals advising sellers about canvassing techniques suggested that the best way to assure a circulation record of this sort was to generate a subscription list beginning with the most infl uential individuals in a community (or in this case a military company), since viewing “the array of signatures strikes the person with a sort of mesmeric infl uence.” “Having thus got started,” the Agents’ Companion noted, “the thing goes like an epi- demic.”142 An expanded market for books and a more literate public to appreciate them were advantages, obviously, for authors like Lippard desirous of reaching more readers with their political and economic messages in a new age of mass communications. 143 Such knowledge created obligations as well, however, since technologies of mass production not only allowed authors to reach more people but also required them to do so. As the sheer volume of literature available to readers increased exponentially, capturing a wide enough market

44 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4444 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM share to justify a large production run of a popular book was the only possible protection for authors against being lost in the literary deluge. Market conditions conferred power on readers as well. Writers of mass-produced popular histories such as Lippard, for instance, had to make concessions to readers in ways that historians writing for “prestige publishers” were not obliged to do. Popular authors reached their audiences through media that were uniquely attuned to the demands and conditions for shaping the popular imagination.144 The challenge for popular writers such as Lippard was in trying to fi gure out what the preferences of mass audiences were. “Popular art assumes its own particular kind of audience, huge, heterogeneous, bewilderingly diverse in its combination of life styles, manners, interests, tastes, and economic and educational levels,” Russel Nye has argued, and it must be adjusted to the “median taste.”145 Philadelphia publisher, T. B. Peterson, reprinted Lippard’s popular histories of the Revolution and Mexican War on the strength not only of the serialized versions of the manuscript read by soldiers in the Mexican War but also on the basis of Lippard’s successful novelizations published by crosstown rival, G. B. Zieber. Triumphs in the fi ction book market were the best possible endorsement for popularizers hoping to fi nd publishers for their histories, and publishers like Zieber who extended book contracts to literary fi gures with established reputations were rewarded often with increased sales.146 The system was a fl uid one characterized by incentives and rewards, and, as with many such systems, abuses sometimes occurred. Peterson, for instance, convinced various Philadelphia newspapers that everything Lippard produced was contracted under the T. B. Peterson name, causing diffi culties for Zieber and other distributors that marketed Lippard’s works. Toward the end of his life, even as he lay dying of tuberculosis, in fact, Lippard sent angry letters to the editors of the Philadelphia Dispatch complaining that Peterson was a “mercenary creature” who had “made his thousands of dollars off of me” while reducing the market share of other publishers by confusing consumers about how to purchase books.147 These squabbles revealed the increased fi nancial rewards associated with the market for popular historical literature and the sometimes desperate measures publishers used to capture them.148 Peterson and Zieber understood intuitively what Russel Nye noted later about the standards of comprehension and achievement in the popular book market—that they required a work to be “received from consensus,” to be “commonly approved, pervasive in the population, ‘popular’ in the sense that the majority of people like and endorse it and will not accept marked deviations from its standards and conventions.” Since popularizers aimed “at the largest common denominator, they tend[ed] to standardize at the median level of majority expectation.”149 In Lippard’s case, speculations concerning what Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 45

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4545 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM this common denominator culture might wish to believe about its history encouraged a strong mythologizing impulse. In Washington and His Generals, for instance, Lippard advanced the infamous “Liberty Bell myth” which proclaimed that the signing of the Declaration of Independence was announced to the American people on July 4, 1776, by the tolling of the bell in the tower of the Pennsylvania State House by an old man on a signal from a little, blue- eyed, fl axen-haired boy who yelled “Ring!” As many historians have pointed out, none of the details of this story is correct, since there was no public celebration of the signing, which, in any event, began on August 2, 1776, and was not completed until mid-January of 1777. Concerned but little with verifi able fact, Lippard believed he could render service as a historian by inspiring the nation to a celebration of its “solemn symbol[s],” and a “legend was soon invented which qualifi ed the bell historically for [a] new polemical use.” The Liberty Bell has since been reproduced on coins, postage stamps, and government bonds, becoming one of the “most cherished emblems of American nationality, American purpose, and the American mission.” According to Daniel Boorstin, without “Lippard’s fertile if saccharine imagination, this might never have been possible.”150 David Reynolds has added that “Lippard’s development of the Liberty Bell legend illustrates the poetic license [he] felt free to take with history,” which the novelist-turned-historian justifi ed on the grounds that he was “performing an inestimable service to his country by adding color, warmth, and patriotic emphasis to dry history” through a “fi ctional embellishment” of the past.151 Lippard was also a genius in making use of such rhetorical fl ourishes. Be- cause the “thing which generally passes for History, is the most impudent, swaggering bully, the most graceless braggart, the most reckless equivocator that ever staggered forth on the great stage of the world,” he wrote in Legends of Mexico, “it must be infused with those heart-warm stories, which, quivering in rude, earnest language from the lips of the spectator of a battle, or the survi- vor of some event of olden time, fi ll up the cold outlines of history, and clothe the skeleton with fl esh and blood, give it eyes and tongue, force it at once to look into our eyes and talk with us!”152 This rather causal statement of method revealed a rather sophisticated philosophy of popular history. The accuracy of the sources used to convey “impressions” about the past was less important than the vividness of those sources as agents of the historical. Hence, fi ctional devices could be just as appropriate as archival materials, if not more so, in conveying what was really meaningful about the past. The literary excesses of this passage also remind us that in the mid-nineteenth century “rhetoric,” a term that has an empty, vacuous connotation today, was more signifi cant than “explanation” in conveying historical meaning.153 Popular historians were 46 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4646 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM rhetoricians fi rst and foremost, and they recognized that their work was primarily a literary (some said fi ction-making) operation.154 Another Philadelphian whose works helped to defi ne the marketplace for popular history was John Frost, a teacher and novelist who capitalized on the growing market for “common” histories in the mid-nineteenth century. Born in Kennebunk, Maine, in 1800, Frost was educated at Bowdoin and Harvard, where he was recognized for his substantial gifts as a writer and student of history. As early as 1822, Frost’s vision was expressed in his Bowdoin-prize winning essay at Harvard, “The Character of Washington; Its Infl uence and Importance,” in which Washington’s career was treated not only in a conventional political and institutional manner but also in terms of the role of literature, art, and history in the young Republic. Anticipating by a decade and a half Emerson’s opening passages in “Nature,” Frost wrote of Americans: “We have manners, opinions and notions, as peculiar and idiomatic as those of any other country,” a history “whose spirit is by no means extinct, whose events and characters possess a most powerful hold on the association of the people, and present a rich, and almost unbroken fi eld for literary enterprises.” The most fertile era for the harvesting of national historical treasures, Frost argued, was the American Revolution, which offered many “dignifi ed subjects for the various departments of literature.” Yet Frost lamented that American writers had “deplorably neglected” the birth of the nation as a subject for literary study. Urging future historians to choose “the forming period of our national existence” as their “favourite theme,” Frost led the way by promising someday to write a “drama” that would “copy nature in our peculiar manners and sentiments, and borrow its dignity from the moral sublime of the Revolution.”155 These sentiments paralleled the pleas of William Gilmore Simms for an historical literature that capitalized on the most dramatic moments in the nation’s history, such as the interaction between Benedict Arnold and Major John Andre. James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel The Spy (1821) was as close as any of Frost’s contemporaries had come to realizing this vision of a dramatic and instructive narrative of the Revolution. Frost hoped to emulate the work of Cooper by writing a companion piece to it. His aspirations in this regard, however, were delayed after his graduation from Harvard by his need to make money. He spent the majority of the 1820s and 1830s teaching and serving as the principal of a school outside of Philadelphia. When not engaged in the time-consuming pursuit of training young minds, Frost dabbled with his Cooper knock-off, which was eventually published in 1841 as Enoch Crosby; or, the Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolution.156 This novel did not have much of a literary impact, but it was noteworthy for its portrait of the political spirit of the revolutionary times, and it gave Frost the confi dence

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 47

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4747 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM to believe that, like Lippard and Irving, he could make the transition from fi ction writing to popular history. Eventually he developed a plan to write a comprehensive history of the United States, a project that preoccupied him throughout much of the mid-1840s. The history became an obsession that did not always endear him to his students, many of whom were made to act as “assistants” in various research assignments associated with the project. Accusing Frost of manipulating their children for personal gain, several wealthy parents withdrew their fi nancial support from his school, and he was forced to resign. As an acquaintance noted, Frost’s passion for teaching proved “incongruous” with his love of literature, and “literature triumphed.”157 In the years following his resignation from teaching, Frost produced hundreds of books for the popular market. Part of his incredible productivity was motivated by fi nancial necessity. Like some better-known historians of his day (Parkman and Prescott, especially), Frost was often “in severe bodily pain,” and much of his money and time were devoted to repairing himself physically. Unlike Parkman and Prescott, Frost had little disposable income. He was also the father of ten children, and he was saddled with fi nancial concerns throughout his career. “Weighed down in his last years by business perplexities and troubles,” he was accused of writing “potboilers” in order to generate quick profi ts. Such hurried productivity came to symbolize, in the eyes of his detractors, the irresponsibility and lack of thorough research associated with popular history.158 If Frost cut corners in order to produce books rapidly, however, such tendencies allowed him to publish works of enormous variety and breadth. He began by writing mainly schoolbooks on every conceivable subject—literature, foreign language, oratory, natural history—to name a few. He then progressed to travel accounts, captivity narratives, ancient histories, and broad and ambitious compendia with titles such as The Wonders of History, “comprising remarkable battles, sieges, feats of arms, and instances of courage, ability and magnanimity, occurring in the annals of the world, from the earliest ages to the present.” He penned works designed to edify, such as The Book of Good Exam- ples Drawn from Authentic History and Biography and The Book of Anecdotes; or the Moral of History, which made moral examples out of certain “illustrative” historical fi gures. This remarkable production of books for readers of all ages earned Frost a reputation throughout the United States and even Europe, where his popular works were stolen or cannibalized by publishers anxious to capitalize on the European interest in things American.159 The promises Frost made to himself and others in his precocious college essay were realized fi nally in the Popular History of the United States, which appeared fi rst in a pictorial format in the mid-1840s. In the preface to his volumes, Frost defi ned the “popular” mission of his work: “to furnish, within

48 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4848 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2012:58:20 PMPM a reasonable compass, a complete history of the United States, suited to the purposes of the general reader.” This goal was to be accomplished through a “plain and intelligible story” emphasizing the harmony and unity of the American experience. The challenge, both literary and intellectual, he understood, was to develop a “compact and clear” narrative that would emphasize the “singleness” of a unique “national consciousness” while giving recognition to the diversity of the country. “The large number of distinct communities of which the republic is composed; the different views which actuated their founders; and the extent of territory over which they were originally spread, render it diffi cult to combine their annals into a single work,” Frost wrote, but he felt it was his obligation to attempt such a unifi ed vision in order to inspire readers to act in responsibly “American” ways. In addition to this patriotic purpose, Frost also understood that a consolidating perspective would increase the marketability of his books, since readers in every regional market could fi nd something of themselves in such volumes. The consumer-driven techniques of popular literature used by Frost to encourage movement from the “pluribus” to the “unum” of the American experience increased the likelihood that his popular history would achieve the wide circulation and broad appeal he intended for it.160 Since Frost viewed clarity of vision as essential to any historical work aspiring to popular acclaim, he took the literary challenges of writing popular history very seriously. First and foremost he believed that his narrative must be organized around a central, enduring principle that could serve as a literary structuring device for conveying to readers the true genius of the American experiment. For Frost, as it had been for Lippard, this principle was liberty. Lib- erty was “the American Palladium,” Frost wrote, the sacred embodiment of an ancient, “impalpable and inextinguishable fi re of freedom, still burning in the hearts of the people, and still destined to elude the grasp of tyranny.” Citizens of the United States were destined to fulfi ll liberty’s promises, he added, as evidenced by the numerous instances of the hand of fate interposing itself “to save Americans” from threats. The American people operated “under the smiles of Heaven,” rightly “trust[ing] Providence for success,” and Providence rarely failed them, he argued. The Pilgrims on board the Mayfl ower were delivered from the “starving time” because they “were destined to fi gure in the world’s history.” In the battle of Louisbourg, “the arm of Providence saved the colonists” from the storms, shipwrecks, pestilence and suicide that determined the French to abandon their siege. The colony of Georgia was able to avoid war with the Spanish “by an event beyond human foresight or control,” by a storm at sea that “providentially saved [it] from destruction.” When battles during the American Revolution promised poorly for American troops, the Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 49

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 4949 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM day was often won by sudden changes of weather conditions or the swelling of rivers brought on by the controlling hand of fate. In all such cases, the “people throughout the country were cheered and enlivened” by such a “direct manifestation of the fact that Omnipotence was enlisted in their behalf.”161 In documenting instances of the role of Providence in the American saga, Frost appealed to the strong pride and vanity of Americans who were only too willing to view themselves as participants in God’s master plan. He was motivated by the same impulses that had compelled Duyckinck and the Young Americans to declare for a new and unique American literary sensibility. Frost envisioned his volumes not only as a history of the nation’s past but as a window onto her glorious future, and he structured the chapters of his history around sensational moments in the growth of liberty as plotted through time. During the 1840s, before the fi ssures of the Civil War were evident to everyone, it was still possible for Frost to argue that the single-minded pursuit of liberty bound ancestor to ancestor across generations of American experience. The threat of slavery, with its inherent disregard for the liberty of some, presented a serious challenge to Frost’s vision of unity, and he admitted that “the territory which had proved a seat of liberty” to many southerners was “a grave for the freedom of others.” Yet Frost defl ected the most divisive aspects of the slave question by universalizing the experience of slavery, reminding readers in the North and in Europe that they, too, were participants in victimizing systems of labor. “[S]lavery was not confi ned to the natives of Africa and their descendants,” he noted, but extended to indentured servitude, the mistreatment of Indians, and the abuse of foreign workers. Even in their lapses from liberty, Americans remained unifi ed in attitude and behavior in Frost’s integrated history.162 Frost made a conscious effort to employ the literary devices of the Young Americans, including all the substantial elements of the master narrative or Great Story. From a literary point of view, the advantage of organizing the Popular History around a structural principle such as liberty was that it provided an easy mechanism for classifying the protagonists and antagonists in this Great American story. Simply put, heroes were those who upheld the values of freedom and who were willing to fi ght and die to defend them. The sufferings of Roger Williams “should never be forgotten by the friends of religious liberty,” Frost wrote, nor the fact that he was a “houseless wanderer in the woods,” shunned by former friends and foes alike because of his beliefs. Penn’s treaty was “a noble specimen of the combined mildness and fi rmness” which characterized the Quaker “pursuit of liberty.” And Lafayette provided “one of the most striking examples of heroism and disinterestedness recorded in the pages of history,” because he left “the endearments of home, and the brilliant destinies which awaited him as one of the fi rst nobles of France,” in 50 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5050 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM order “to plunge in the blood and dust of our inauspicious struggle” on behalf “of his great zeal for the cause of liberty.” That dedication to freedom sustained Lafayette’s fellow soldiers during the American Revolution who drew sustenance from his “vigorous exertions in the cause of liberty.” Destitute of shoes and clothing and pained by “gashes infl icted upon the naked feet of the champions of liberty,” soldiers in the fi nal Virginia campaign nonetheless let “no complaints” escape their lips. The patriots may have been “ill-armed, ill- disciplined and disorderly,” Frost wrote, but they were “not defi cient in courage and zeal for their liberty.”163 Villains, on the other hand, were those who restricted freedoms or betrayed those patriots working for liberty. In recounting their ignominious behaviors, Frost demonstrated some of the sensationalism of Lippard, focusing on the subversive nature of human depravity. The Tories, for instance, were the an- tithesis of liberty, notorious scoundrels capable of “inhumanely massacring” freedom-minded civilians. In Fort Kingston, Pennsylvania, Tories set a pali- sade on fi re, consuming in fl ames the innocent American citizens huddled within its walls. In South Carolina, another group of Tories (resembling “a body of plundering banditti”) stole “every kind of property they could carry off,” yet they served as vigilante justices against violators of parole, such as Colonel Isaac Hayne, who was executed without compassion despite the pleas of family and friends. “His little children, who had lately lost their mother, were introduced, and fell at the tyrant’s knees, praying him to pity their moth- erless situation, and give them back their only remaining parent; but in vain,” Frost noted with contempt. Finally, a traitor like Benedict Arnold was the most abhorrent of all violators of liberty. In Frost’s estimation, Arnold deserved the ignominious reputation he earned during his “dishonourable life” and died as he must, an “unlamented” rogue who transmitted to his children “a name of hateful celebrity.”164 While Frost’s treatment of Arnold’s betrayal and death did not quite fulfi ll Simms’s dramatic request for a “baffl ed traitor (Arnold)—hell in his heart and curse on his lips” being led “to the inglorious scaffold which the audience does not see,” it still shared in that “tragic interest” that Simms insisted must be a part of the Arnold story and its intriguing subplots.165 In order to verify and legitimize his point about the power of liberty in the American experience, Frost felt obliged (more so than Simms and Lippard did, at least) to convince readers that he was an impartial observer of American fortunes. In his preface to the Popular History, Frost warned that he thought it “inexpedient to dwell upon disputed points, or to enter into extended dis- quisitions” in his history, and he went out of his way to be judicious in his handling of partisan matters. “I am conscious of no undue bias towards any sect or party,” he noted about his popular history, “and I have adopted no Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 51

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5151 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM theory respecting government or policy, which could infl uence my selection or representation of facts.” Despite these assurances, however, Frost was an avowed Federalist who did not hide well his suspicions of Jeffersonian Re- publicans. He could not, for instance, resist remarking on the imprudence of the anti-federalists in attacking the policies of Washington and John Adams in the 1790s. A supporter of the controversial Jay’s Treaty, Frost condemned the “violent opposition” of the radical Jeffersonians who maligned the treaty as a base “act of ingratitude” on the part of the British. Frost also supported the unpopular actions of John Adams in championing the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, justifying the legislation as a necessary protection against those “French emissaries who fomented riotous expressions of popular opposition to the measures of the government.” Some of these assessments by Frost implied a suspicion of the masses for whom his popular history was intended, but he felt obliged to remind readers that mob mentalities and rash behaviors were as great a threat to liberty as was tyranny. Hence, Frost adopted the unpopular position that the Boston Massacre was the fault of the reckless patriot mob led by a few hotheads playing irresponsibly on “an infl amed state of public mind.” Anne Hutchinson, whose stand against the Puritan clergy had earned her a reputation as a champion of liberty, was too much of a hothead as well as a feminist for Frost. He described Hutchinson as “neither wise nor considerate in the style and manner she adopted,” noting indelicately that the “somewhat unbecoming position in which, as a woman, she placed herself” added to her “offences and indiscretions.”166 Above all, Frost strove in his popular narrative to emulate the storytelling geniuses of Irving, Cooper, and other historical novelists whose works he admired. “[T]he principal diffi culty has been to select what was important and infl uential, and to present it in such a light as should render it striking and effective,” he wrote in his preface. To meet the challenge, Frost borrowed heavily from the romantic literary conventions of his day employed by Lippard and others, especially those associated with the theater. Melodrama and theatrical asides were common features of Frost’s prose. His Spaniards do not merely sail and explore; they are “fi red . . . with a romantic spirit of adventure” and imbued with “hopes of conquest and immortality.” His conquistadors do not just search unsuccessfully for wealth; they discover tragically the “chimerical foundation” upon which “all their golden hopes had been reared.” Frost also used romantic tropes and conventions to emphasize the epic struggle for the continent. “The star of the western empire had struggled through the clouds and was emerging into the clear fi rmament,” he wrote in purple prose. “The century of discovery had been a century of progress.” And organic metaphors proliferate as well. The “seeds of fatal disease” were sown in the early colonial period, Frost noted, 52 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5252 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM while political and social systems in America were “planted in the fi rm soil of independence, and fl ourish[ed] in the bracing air of civil and religious freedom.” Finally, Frost employed the sensationalizing conventions of the gothic to increase the interest of his readers, especially the fascination with superstition and death. Frost’s Native Americans have an apparitional quality to them, often “[c]reeping cautiously through the woods which surrounded the scattered towns” to “suddenly start up from their lurking places in the dead of night,” to massacre unsuspecting citizens, and to disappear like specters to “their distant retreats in the woods.” Soldiers fi ghting on the frontier were vulnerable to the “strange sights and sounds” of mysterious war: “the singing of bullets, and the awful passing away of drums in the air; invisible troops of horses . . . riding to and fro; and . . . the phantoms of men, fearfully fl itting by!”167 When Frost found his own literary powers insuffi cient, he was not above borrowing liberally from those who had gone before him in conveying the drama of a particular historical scene. Not surprisingly, Washington Irving was one of his favorite sources for appropriation. Frost’s treatment of Columbus’s landing in the New World, for instance, is taken almost verbatim from the passages in Irving’s biography of the seafarer cited earlier: “The joy and exulta- tion of the crews were now unbounded,” Frost wrote in imitation of Irving. “They thronged around the admiral, embraced him, and kissed his hands. Those who had been most mutinous were now most devoted and enthusiastic. Some begged favours of him as one who had wealth and honours in his gift, and many who had outraged them by their insolence, offered the most implicit obedience to his commands.”168 Lest we be too critical of Frost for nearly pla- giarizing Irving’s ideas and language in this direct manner, we should bear in mind that such borrowings were typical in the mid-nineteenth century. An example of what Richard Vitzthum calls nineteenth-century “paraphrasing,” these usages of prior texts were viewed in their day less as acts of intellectual piracy than as fl attering confi rmations of the prior authority of a particular literary presentation of historical events. The “verbal and syntactical echoes” of Irving in Frost underscore the shared commitment of both writers to a novelistic literary approach to the past.169 Washington Irving returned the favor when he incorporated perspectives and passages from works by Frost into his multivolume biography of George Washington written in the late 1850s.170 The successes of Lippard and Frost in the literary marketplace demonstrated the important niche that popular histories occupied in an emerging industry of popular books in the 1840s and 1850s. As Fahs has pointed out, the proliferation of such works suggested that history was not “sacralized” in any sense of the word; that is, it was not “beyond commerce” but was instead an acceptable coin of the realm insofar as cultural traffi cking of ideas was concerned. As the Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 53

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5353 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM demand for works such as Lippard’s and Frost’s increased, the subscription and retail industries in history boomed for canvassing agents who traveled the country pre-enrolling readers in projected literary series. To capture a suffi - cient market share, publishers offered more lavish illustrations and cover art in their works which increased appreciably in size and numbers of volumes. Some fi rms adopted a “history-by-the-pound approach,” by which they advertised the advantages of their popular works over those of competitors on the basis of the number of pages and words per page.171 Others collapsed longer texts into smaller packages to attract younger readers and those with less patience for metahistories. Lippard and Frost employed these accordion-like tactics to good fi nancial success in works such as Frost’s Popular History of the United States, a condensed version of the four-volume Pictorial History of the United States reduced to a highly salable one-volume edition. These authors even fan- cied that their works were substantial enough in terms of quality to meet the standards for popularity established by Duyckinck and others. “A strong man may make a bad style popular,” Lippard acknowledged, “since the reader does not look at the dress, but at the form which that dress serves to clothe.” A weak man, however, “may write ever so euphoniously; style, grammar, and words all correct, and of the smoothest sound; and yet he can never be a popular writer. The pretty dress of his words cannot conceal his emptiness.”172 By these defi nitions, Lippard and Frost thought of themselves as strong and “well-clothed” men helping to defi ne an increasingly robust industry.

Gilded Mediocrity

There is no denying that the works of Lippard and Frost ushered in a new era of appreciation among middle-class Americans for popular historical literature. Their collective writings prompted an outburst of literary production in the ﬁ eld of popular history that should have thrilled Duyckinck given the preferences he outlined in “Literary Prospects of 1845” and the Cyclo- paedia of American Literature. In fact, however, Duyckinck never acknowledged the efforts made by Lippard and Frost to advance his popular scheme; indeed, he chose not to include either in his compendia of literary progress despite their popularity as novelists and historians, not even in a footnote in the original 1855 edition of the Cyclopaedia or in the revised 1866 edition. In the introduction to both editions, Duyckinck claimed that it had not been his purpose “to sit in judgment, and admit or exclude writers according to individual taste,” but clearly he had done so with respect to these two popular historians.173 How else might we explain the exclusion of an author, Lippard, 54 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5454 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM whom the Godey’s Lady’s Book referred to in 1849 as “unquestionably the most popular writer of the day”?174 What else could account for the fact that the prolifi c Frost was not represented anywhere in the extensive “List of American Authors” that Duyckinck kept among his personal papers nor in his equally exhaustive “Index of Sources of American History”?175 Even the sometimes maligned Samuel Eliot made both lists, and he received several paragraphs in the 1855 edition of the Cyclopaedia as well.176 Given Duyckinck’s familiarity with a vast array of American literary efforts, and given the desperation with which he sought evidence of the emergence of a historical sensibility among Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the omissions of Lippard and Frost must be seen as deliberate. Why, then, did Duyckinck snub them? Those skeptical of Duyckinck and the Young America movement, such as the literary critic Rufus Griswold of the New York Herald, thought they knew the answer. Griswold attributed the omissions to Duyckinck’s ineptitude as a literary historian. In what Perry Miller has called “the most destructive review in all American history,” Griswold wrote a scathing assessment of the Cyclopaedia of American Literature in which he referred to Duyckinck as a sloppy and inexpert thinker. Griswold accused Duyckinck of having a regional bias toward New Yorkers and of dismissing writers from Philadelphia such as Lippard and Frost in favor of those affi liated with a certain circle of acquaintances who gathered regularly at a salon at 20 Clinton Place in New York City. Griswold made lists, state by state, of authors the Duyckincks had ignored, noting the inordinately lengthy passages devoted to minor writers and the sparse ones associated with more popular fi gures. Griswold also condemned Duyckinck’s reliance on “inaccurate magazines” and the proliferation of their “grammatical blunders.” He concluded his review by asking how persons “so ignorant of the commonest and simplest uses of language” could have been entrusted with publishing such an important project? 177 Duyckinck admitted to some mistakes, and he was compulsive about keeping lists of errata for future editions of the work, even preserving notes from book peddlers such as the one who wrote to say that, as “Agent for this county for Mr. Frederick Parker of Boston for the sale of Cyclopaedia of American Literature,” he felt obliged to point out to his customers some of the “inaccuracies in the work.”178 Duyckinck objected strongly, however, to Gris- wold’s portrait of him as incompetent. He condemned Griswold’s vitriolic review as payback for an earlier, negative assessment of Griswold’s Prose Writers of America (1847) printed in the American Whig Review, a journal published by Wiley and Putnam.179 While Duyckinck was blind partially to the activities of writers in certain regional centers of American literary activity, a more likely and certainly more

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 55

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5555 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM generous explanation of his rejection of Lippard and Frost was his concern for the “cheap” quality of the works they produced. Although Duyckinck desired to make inexpensive volumes available to average American readers, he did not wish to commodify history in such a way as to demean its message. In his opinion, booksellers (or “dollar lords” as he sometimes called them) were often guilty of commercializing popular literature by turning the sale of books into a carnival event in which “gilded mediocrity” was the standard. Ac- cording to Widmer, Duyckinck resented “the money element” that had crept into literary matters and warned about what it had done to contribute to “the ignorance of the American masses concerning culture.” Authors such as Lip- pard and Frost were not the “invisible angels” he sought, Duyckinck reasoned; they were among the “great . . . puffers and pretenders who write to-day what to-morrow destroys.”180 What was at issue here was an important distinction between the defi nition of “cheap” as inexpensive or low in cost and its alternative meaning as not worthy of respect or vulgar. Duyckinck was not alone in his campaign against cheap literature of the latter sort, especially in association with the excesses of subscription publishing.181 Newspaper advertisements in the Lowell Patriot warned potential purchasers of subscription novels against the poor quality and deceptive marketing of such works, implying that literary agents had the power to “make you subscribe for a forthcoming work before you know it, even while you are determined to eschew the pedler [sic] and his works.”182 In Duyckinck’s estimation these abuses of marketing had to change and were changing, in part because of the refusal of critics such as himself to dignify marginal authors by including them in collections such as the Library of American Books or the Cyclopaedia of American Literature. “The cupid- ity of publishers had overstocked the market, and the traffi c fell,” Duyckinck noted of such overproduced popular books. “Let it perish,” he added. “We would fain hope that the literary system which has been distinguished by the epithet ‘cheap and nasty,’ is pretty much at an end.”183 Duyckinck rejected especially the tendencies of popular historians like Lip- pard and Frost to draw inspiration from the cruder, sentimental fi ctional literature of the age. The dependency of popular historians on novels meant that many types of fi ction were represented in their works, and even the tolerant Young Americans disapproved of some of the most sensationalized prototypes. The nineteenth-century novelist John Neal had “impugn[ed] leading Ameri- can writers, including Washington Irving . . . as tame and imitative”; he longed instead for “rude, coarse m[e]n” like George Lippard, whose “[s]ubversive fi c- tion” introduced a “deliberately outrageous, infl ammatory, [and] disquieting” element into history.184 Duyckinck, who preferred Irving over Neal or Lippard, could not tolerate such irreverence, which he associated with the excesses of

56 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5656 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2112:58:21 PMPM French fi ction writers such as Madame de Stael, George Sand, Honoré de Bal- zac, and Victor Hugo. Disdaining “long drawn, vapid novels of an unprofi table, if not an injurious character,” Duyckinck vowed to include in his collections only “works of Classic Fiction—where the moral is superior to the mere story.”185 He shared a common suspicion of historical novels that seduced readers with “beguiling visions of the sentimental, the perverse and the unattainable.” M. M. Backus, the author of an 1844 article in Christian Parlor Magazine titled “Novel Writers & Publishers” agreed, arguing that a typical sensational novel in this category borrows too much “from poetry, history, and the actual of life, which is not its own, and borrows it only to corrupt.”186 Several decades later, Reverend J. T. Crane of the Methodist Episcopal Church wrote a scathing indictment of such historical novels in Popular Amusements (1869), proclaiming “novel- reading” as “one of the great vices of our age.” Crane objected to the fact that readers of inappropriate works of fi ction, especially the young, were subjected to “weak and washy literature” that obscured “sober history or real biography” and left readers ignorant “of the world of fact” by too frequent “acquaintance with the world of dreams.” Crane’s advice for the historically minded? “ABSTI- 187 NENCE FROM NOVEL-READING HENCEFORTH AND FOREVER.” If Duyckinck wished to avoid association with that which was “cheap and nasty,” he had to fi nd ways to separate the works he promoted in his Library of American Books from those of mere compilers, almanac writers, and petty popularizers. This was no easy task, as the publishers Wiley and Putnam acknowledged, since their mutual goal was to issue books that were “chosen both for their classic merit and their popular character,” traits that at times seemed self-contradictory. The publishers were unrealistic, perhaps, in their expectations that their works might “equally delight the scholar and the general reader” alike.188 Nonetheless, book canvassers tried to appeal to both ends of the market, and “respectable” agents such as Mrs. E. L. Harris fi led weekly sales reports documenting the “good class of people” she encountered whose enrollments “symbolized important aspects of their character and standing as a community member.” Amy Thomas is right in challenging the assumption “that nineteenth-century subscription books were primarily targeted to people in rural areas,” especially those supposed “literary unsophisticates” who “unwittingly purchased the overproduced and overpriced books hawked by wiley agents.” As Thomas points out, many publishers and book agents, including those associated with promoting Duyckinck’s works, tried to reach “middle- and upper-class people” for whom book purchasing was viewed not so much as a sign of degenerate tastes as a vehicle for cultural uplift. These were consumers “infl uenced by the meaning inherent in the acts of buying a book from another human being and having one’s name entered onto a list signifying Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 57

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5757 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM ‘book buyer.’ ”189 The more elevated style of writing in these popular works saved history from degenerating into petty materialism, Duyckinck believed. At the very least it kept authors from indulging dangerously in the incessant “buying and selling, sowing and reaping” that distracted readers from “partaking of that higher life which the poet teaches us to live.”190 Duyckinck was sensitive to accusations of commercialism in the popular book market because his own collections of edited works had been attacked as too commercial. The Library of American Books, in particular, had been condemned as materialistic in a review in the North American Review by the Harvard professor of Greek literature Cornelius Felton, who claimed that the Wiley and Putnam series, “with the exception of a few of the volumes, is not likely to do much honor to American literature.” Felton questioned the editorial decision making that had led to the inclusion of such “poor . . . materials for an American library,” and he found it “diffi cult to imagine what can have seduced those respectable publishers into printing” some of the “indescribably stupid” works in the series unless a disdainful commercial motive were responsible. A volume in the Library of American Books by Duyckinck’s close friend Cornelius Mathews was especially targeted as a piece of “dismal trash” that “cannot have been seriously chosen as a fi t representative of American originality.” Felton also rejected the hypernationalism of Simms’s articles in Views and Reviews, which he claimed “breathe an extravagant nationality, equally at war with good taste and generous progress in liberal culture.”191 Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a contributor to the Duyckinck Library, criticized the threadbare parochialism of Simms and the series. “The themes suggested by him, viewed as he views them, would produce nothing but historical novels, cast in the same worn out mould that has been in use these thirty years, and which it is time to break up and fl ing away,” Hawthorne lamented in the Salem Advertiser.192 Critics such as these believed that the Library of American Books had gone too far in the direction of lowering the standards for legitimate literature in the name of popularity, with legitimate understood to mean literature that maintained commitments to meaningful subject matter and acceptable methodologies. These criticisms were deeply hurtful to Duyckinck, who had been concerned from the beginning with the potential trivializing tendencies of popular literature. Indeed, Duyckinck’s Copyright Club met regularly in the 1840s to complain about the “catchpenny” literature that was fl ooding the American literary marketplace from Europe, and they circulated charged public addresses on the subject. “Certain books of a noxious character being found to hit the appetite of certain readers, others, of a broader stamp, in a like vein, have been produced from foreign tongues, and distributed by the 58 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5858 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM thousand and ten thousand,” members complained in one such dissertation. “The foreign supply coming short, native writers, of an easy conscience, have been put in training, to try themselves upon whatever is coarsest and vilest.” They worried that undiscriminating readers would not be able to distinguish between suitable popular literature and that which must by nature corrupt. “Every landmark and barrier separating good and bad literature has broken down,” they feared, “and a race of the trashiest publications in style, in matter, in type and looks, that the slime of the cities ever bred, has swarmed in every quarter.” As if to underscore his concern for substandard popular literature, Duyckinck displayed a quotation from this address on the front wrapper of every copy of the Library of American Books delivered to American homes.193 Hence, although Duyckinck believed in the democratization of literature, he did not advocate pandering to uneducated audiences for the sake of profi ts merely. Quite the opposite; he wanted a “refi ned and cultivated taste” to per- vade his literary efforts. His idea was to elevate the masses through exposure to “good” literature that they could afford rather than by catering to crude appetites. Duyckinck noted in his diary with satisfaction that the incentive of most people who purchased works from his Library of American Books was to better themselves. “The literary movement appears to come from the masses themselves who are purging themselves of small vulgarities & puerilities of thinking and are asking for something better,” he wrote.194 Duyckinck also had a reputation inside the publishing world for guarding against overstylized popular works. Evidence in this regard can be found in an 1851 exchange between the publisher and writer George W. Curtis and the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton in which the former warned the latter that Duyckinck would tolerate few excesses in the works submitted to him for publication. “I see that you have been experimenting in style,” Curtis wrote to Norton. “It’s rather dangerous—!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel convinced that Evert will never be blown up by any such rash experimenting.”195 In the eyes of some literary historians, these statements suggest Duyckinck’s general cultural elitism and his “deep-seated contempt for the popular press.”196 More to the point, they imply that even those active in the popular book market recognized limitations with respect to what constituted legitimate sources for historical literature. In “Literary Pros- pects of 1845,” Duyckinck singled out for special criticism overwritten newspaper and periodical articles in national publications, warning that such pieces were not as “full of life and truth” as they should be if they wished to inform the historical reputation of the nation; rather they were “constantly over-run with falsehood and foolery.”197 Put simply, there was a signifi cant difference in Duyckinck’s mind between the high-minded populism of Irving and the base offerings of Lippard and Frost.

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 59

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 5959 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM For their part, Lippard and Frost viewed some sensationalizing as natural to any writing designed explicitly for popular audiences; it was readers and not writers, after all, who determined the value of popular literature by dictating what sold and what did not. Lippard’s attitudes about the place of the sentimental in historical studies were made explicit in his publicity campaign for an 1844 semimonthly periodical—Lippard’s Magazine of American Historical Romance. The magazine, he expected, would advance “the cause of a distinct and individual National Literature” by combining romantic “old-time histories, incidents and customs” with “an honest critical department.” The goal was to combine the emotional pull of romance with the dispassionate facts of history, all the while avoiding the “two evils of all our critical journals” such as Duyckinck’s Literary World by “neither partaking in character of the unprincipled cut-and-thrust school nor of the undiscriminating-praise school.” Every two numbers of the periodical would feature “an original Novel, Romance or Story, illustrative of some noted Revolutionary Battlefi eld [to] be published entire,” Lippard told sponsors, followed in the next edition by “a History of a Revolutionary Battle-fi eld, embracing all the Fact, Tradition and Legend connected with the occurrence.”198 Revealingly, Lippard wrote Cooper not Irivng for an endorsement of the project, because Cooper, he believed, had a “genius” for combining elements of fi ction and history in his novels in the best tradition of historical romance. Equally important, however, is the fact that Lippard’s Magazine of American Historical Romance was never published. As with so many things that Lippard undertook, support was not forthcoming in the 1840s, and Lippard died in 1854, at the age of thirty-two, before he could revive the project. A 1922 article in the Philadelphia Record published on the centenary of Lippard’s birth captured the signifi cance of this and other failures best when it described the novelist and historian as a “Prolifi c Author of Fic- tion During His Short Life—Sensational, but of Good Intent—Now Forgot- ten.” Such an epitaph might also have applied to Frost and other mid-century practitioners in the fi eld of popular history whose works exploded onto the popular book market in the mid-1840s but did not weather the critical attacks that came from Duyckinck and others concerning their methodologies and editorial assumptions.

Unguided Wanderings of the Imagination

In Duyckinck’s “critique by neglect” of Lippard and Frost, we see the nascent shadows of a more ominous cloud of critical disapproval that eventually obscured and nearly obliterated the work of many popular historians.

60 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6060 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM Irving achieved some measure of literary immortality through his works of historical literature, but George Lippard and John Frost did not escape the burden of obscurity they so much feared, in part because readability was only one of several important criteria for long-term success in the literary marketplace. Sustainability of ideas also mattered. Just because the works of historians such as these were well read in their own day did not guarantee that they would be remembered beyond it, especially given that the defi nitions of what constituted “legitimate” historical activity were shifting. A case in point was John S. C. Abbott, whose popular histories of the Civil War sold in excess of 300,000 copies, but whose name is little known today. Part of Abbott’s anonymity was the result of a successful campaign by the cultural critic E. L. Godkin to discredit Abbott and his kind. In a series of private letters to Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review, Godkin complained that Abbott’s histories “are fair specimens of a kind of literature of which there is an immense quantity issued every year, and which the half-educated look on as ‘solid reading.’ ” It was “sickening to see him treated in the newspapers with great deference as ‘Abbott the historian,’ ” he added.199 Godkin continued his assault in the pages of the Nation in a November 1865 article titled “History by the Yard,” in which he dismissed Abbott as a “shoddy” writer with a “mis- employed incapacity” and a disposition “which tosses off a book as lightly as a child a soap-bubble, with equal amusement to itself and equal indifference to the consequences.”200 Abbott was a sad representative of a whole phalanx of writers who believed that a work “must be ‘popular’ ” in order to be benefi cial, he noted, a “suffi cient reason, besides haste, why it cannot be fi rst-rate.” Ac- cording to Godkin, such popularizers were willing participants in a nefarious business that “depends for its prosperity on the want of literary discrimina- tion and practical knowledge of books of the people in rural districts, and on American good-nature, which cannot withstand the appeal ad misericordiam of a subscription agent in the guise of a one-legged soldier, a widow, a young lady supporting her mother, or a superannuated clergyman.”201 While George Lippard and John Frost escaped Godkin’s critical notice, they were among those who came under specifi c attack from a new breed of professional historians emerging after the Civil War who demanded, like God- kin, that historical study conform to standardized rules of operation centered on objectivity and the scientifi c pursuit of factual knowledge. In nearly all fi elds of intellectual endeavor, including theology and science, scholars such as Barthold Niebuhr had been insisting on “evidence” as the measure of accuracy and judgment.202 Part of the larger professionalization movement sweeping the nation in the 1860s and 1870s in the wake of a new scientifi c spirit infusing the age, disciples of this new cult of exactitude focused their energies

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 61

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6161 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM Retrospective article in the Philadelphia Record (April 9, 1922) on the writings of George Lippard.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6262 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2212:58:22 PMPM BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6363 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2312:58:23 PMPM on determining what could be directly observed and verifi ed in Nature.203 This posed special challenges for historians, of course, since their subject matter was not always directly observable; indeed, the reliance of popular historians on mythologies and mimetic narrative devices was predicated on the belief of Simms and others that historians must deal in abstractions and innuendoes. Led by scholars who eventually formed the American Historical Association, these professionals condemned efforts of popularizers to make history more attractive to readers through the use of fi ctional conventions, and they insisted that historians could approach the past from a detached, impersonal point of view.204 They had an especially deep suspicion of the corrupting infl uence of narrative on history, and they rejected out of hand the romantic subjectivity and fi ctional contrivances of history as literary art.205 As Peter Novick has noted, their preference was for an “austere style which would clearly distinguish professional historical work from the fl orid effusions of the amateur historians whom the professionals sought to displace.”206 A keen student of trends in the publishing world, Duyckinck seems to have understood and feared the growing power of these emerging scholars in the fi eld of historical literature. Indeed, part of Duyckinck’s desire to distance himself from the excesses of Lippard and Frost was predicated on his sense that history as a discipline was becoming more complicated and challenging and that it required a type of training that the typical novelist-turned-historian could not claim. In assessing Irving’s career at the time of the novelist’s death in 1859, for instance, Duyckinck noted that Irving’s biography of George Washington would have been a much easier undertaking had he begun it in the 1820s, when he fi rst conceived of the project, rather than in the 1850s, when it was eventually published. “Thirty years ago less would have been demanded by the public in the performance of a such a work,” Duyckinck noted, since that was prior to the emergence of a “thoroughly scientifi c school of historians.” In the third decade of the nineteenth century, many of the most relevant sources were still ungathered or unexplored. By the 1850s, however, the “collection of facts by the historical societies and other agencies imposed new ex- actions in the weighing of Evidence.” As Duyckinck argued: “Each addition to the vast Washington Library brought additional care and responsibility” of a sort that suggested the value of professional training in archive management and scientifi c argument. “Researches of this nature may, indeed, be benefi ted [sic] by the judgment of age,” Duyckinck concluded, “but the labor would seem to require the strength and enthusiasm of youth.”207 Much has been written about the conditions that led to the professionalization of disciplines in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century, especially history. The Civil War certainly fi gured prominently, as

64 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6464 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM its harsh realities encouraged Americans to abandon much of the overt sentimentality that had characterized popular writing prior to 1860. It was simply harder to express unconditional enthusiasm for the providential mission of the nation in light of the hundreds of thousands of war dead. The fratricidal confl ict also accelerated a movement already at work in the mid-nineteenth century—the rise of an “age of realism”—in which positivism and scientifi c verifi cation were valued over romantic idealism and spiritual transcendence. The 1860s and 1870s witnessed what Shi refers to as a “rage for ‘facts,’ ” in which “carefully verifi ed sense perceptions constituted the only admissible basis of human knowledge” and during which idealistic philosophy was dismissed as “mere speculation” and “religion as superstition.”208 By the time George Herbert published the Popular History of the Civil War in 1884, many American readers had lost patience already with “the exciting, and sometimes irritating narratives of bitter misunderstandings, mutual jealousies, and san- guinary confl icts with which the records of American history abound.” His popular history was “unbiased, or unprejudiced,” Herbert claimed, “so far as it is possible for human nature” to be so.209 Finally, Darwinian thought also contributed to the rise of realism in that it emphasized the role of measurable change in the inexorable “struggle for survival” that all species faced. Chal- lenging the place of Providence in historical narratives, Darwin’s philosophy fed realist conceptions of a world characterized by a “long, gradual process of intense competition and hereditary development without divine plan or purpose.”210 History had a special role to play in Darwin’s developmental schema, but not a supernatural one. C. M. Andrews described the American Historical Association in its early years as a repository for scholars embracing these realist and Darwinian trends; it was “the accepted promoter of historical work, giving point and direction to historical achievement, and acting as a clearing-house for [such new] historical ideas and enterprises.” In search of “standards or principles to which historical writing is expected to conform,” professionals introduced “higher canons of criticism and interpretation, better balanced judgments, and more rational methods of presentation.” Writers of popular history like Lippard and Frost, who had been satisfi ed merely “to entertain their readers with sprightly and dramatic narrative, rich in style and glowing with color,” he remarked, were challenged by professionals who believed that the “historical concoctions” of amateur historians were “as injurious to the mind that absorbs them and believes in them as were injurious to the human body the old-time frauds and adulterations with which the apothecaries of the past fi lled the stomachs of their patients.” As an alternative to the excesses of “literary hacks,” Andrews offered the profi le of an academic historian whose work “corresponds to the Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 65

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6565 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM experiment in the laboratory, where the investigator is at all times in touch with the problems and workers in the fi eld and is able to make his results known to his brother scientists through the medium of the scientifi c publications.” Such scholarly rigor was essential to the integrity of historical studies in America, Andrews argued. “The historian cannot be a free lance to write as he pleases, for he must play the game according to the accepted rules, and it is one of the outstanding marks of the progress which the study of history has made in this country that there are accepted criteria accompanying historical research and presentation and accepted standards—constituting a code not dreamed of in older days—to which the writer of history must conform.”211 By the end of the nineteenth century, these professionals had been so successful in their campaign to discredit the literary excesses of popularizers that works by people like Lippard and Frost became increasingly obsolete. Duyckinck had done his part to punish through neglect the least professional of the popular historians of his day, although, ironically, his gatekeeping did little to protect him or his works from the literary purges that swept the era. As the permissive editor of the popular Library of American Books who had promoted the vagaries of William Gilmore Simms, Duyckinck came under attack for advancing the argument that history and fi ction were interchangeable with respect to national identity or for the imaginative purposes of art. “Mr. Simms has a great dislike to historical investigators, like Niebuhr,” Cornelius Felton noted, that is, for “men who employ the resources of inexhaustible learning and the instruments of discriminating criticism in correcting errors, misapprehensions, and falsehood.” Expressing little sympathy for those such as Simms who seemed to “prefer ancient error to new truth,” the Harvard professor condemned that “state of mind which leads a man to cling to the fabulous forms of past history, merely because he thinks them romantic and picturesque, as a pernicious sentimentality, as much at war with genuine art as with the cause of truth.” Simms’s obsession with the “mania for fi ction,” Fel- ton noted, distracted him from the practical value of reality, rendering him an “extravagant asserter of the preeminence of art over history, of fi ction over fact, of invention over truth.” Anticipating some of the historical positivism that would come into vogue in the latter part of the century, Felton urged readers of Duyckinck’s volumes to reject their perverse theories in favor of the refl ections of better informed minds—trained minds “stored with facts and dates,—the more numerous the facts, and the more precise the dates, the better.” Popular- izers such as Simms clung to the “vague,” “unsatisfactory,” and “unguided wanderings of the imagination, compared with the light which a record of but a single sentence would throw into the now impenetrable gloom of the past!” The truth of history “is quite as interesting, and often more picturesque,” 66 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6666 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM Felton concluded in anticipation of the professional historian’s cant, “than any romance that can be substituted for it.”212 The savage tone of the attacks of scholars on popularizers derived from the fervency with which the former endorsed new ontological relationships with respect to the American past. According to this new credo, the erstwhile bed- fellows, fi ction and history, must be forcibly disjoined. It became customary, especially among professionals, “to identify truth with fact and to regard fi c- tion as the opposite of truth, hence a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it.” As Hayden White notes, “History came to be set over against fi ction, and especially the novel, as the representation of the ‘actual’ to the representation of the ‘possible’ or only ‘imaginable.’ ” The new goal of professionals was to identify “scientifi c facts” related to the past and to arrange those facts in ways that eliminated the usurping authorial presence of the compiler. “And thus was born the dream of a historical discourse that would consist of nothing but factually accurate statements about a realm of events which were (or had been) observable in principle, the arrangement of which in the order of their original occurrence would permit them to fi gure forth their meaning or signifi cance.” White argues that “typi- cally [the professional historian’s] aim was to expunge every hint of the fi ctive, or merely imaginable, from his discourse, to eschew the techniques of the poet and orator, and to forego what were regarded as the intuitive procedures of the maker of fi ctions in his apprehension of reality.” Professionals wished to avoid the “excesses and failures” of mythic thinking as well as “[f]alse readings of history, misconceptions of the nature of the historical process, unrealistic expectations about the ways that historical societies could be transformed.” They wished “to rise above any impulse to interpret the historical record in the light of party prejudices, utopian expectations, or sentimental attachments to traditional institutions.” Such scholars believed that if “one only eschewed ideology and remained true to the facts, history would produce a knowledge as certain as anything offered by the physical sciences and as objective as a mathematical exercise.”213 This distrust of the literary put professionals at distinct odds with popularizers of history who were wedded to the use of narrative devices borrowed from fi ction as a way of securing their readers’ interests. The writings of the literary romantics like Frost failed to provide “the sober narration that an age of self- restraint demanded of its historians,” Peter Novick has argued.214 Professionals condemned Frost’s Manichean schemes for differentiating between good and bad historical actors as antithetical to the pursuit of historical truth, derived so clearly as they were in their didactic intentions from insights not confi rmable in Nature or the historical record. In this sense, professionals characterized Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 67

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6767 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM popular history as “an intellectually naive form,” one that relied too heavily on philosophical speculation and deductive methods.215 James Harvey Robin- son referred contemptuously to the ancient “tribe of philosophers of history” who “fl attered themselves that their penetrating intellects had been able to discover the wherefore of man’s past without the trouble of learning much about it.”216 The goal of professional historians should be to rid historical writing of any semblance of an “intrusive authorial presence,” “explicit moralizing,” or “overt partisanship” that might seduce readers with false impressions,” Novick has noted. The historian must “undertake the arduous task of purging his consciousness of every vestige parti pris or bias; had to suffi ciently polish his perceptual apparatus or prose style, so that it accurately refl ected reality.” Scholars, therefore, came to distinguish “between the tendentious, superpa- triotic, and propagandistic historical writing of benighted amateurs, and the austere detachment and evenhandedness of the professional.”217 Those who alleged that “popular” history violated the principles of objectivity central to valid historical writing often pointed to the errors of presentation evident in the large number of works of American history published during the 1870s and 1880s. There is no question that some publishers hurried into production many works of substandard quality that have not withstood the test of time as far as historical argument or measures of proof are concerned, to say nothing of balance and perspective. This was true of an updated version of Frost’s Popular History of the United States that was issued in 1881 by Hurst & Company in New York, which treated the Civil War in a brief sixteen pages, the administration of Garfi eld in one sentence. In addition, the desire and need to realize profi ts meant that such histories were subject to conditions of publication and presentation that made it diffi cult for even the most conscientious authors to adhere to the new standards of historical practice proposed by professionals. Editors, art departments, book designers, book agents, and others controlled the primary features of the bookmaking process, and they did not hesitate to manipulate historical material to suit marketing needs. Am- ateur historians might rise above the temptation to embellish in their popular works, but often they could not control signifi cant aspects of the business of production. These subjectivizing tendencies made their works special targets of professionals who were anxious to purge historical writing of all elements of arbitrariness, partisanship, and the distorting conventions of fi ction. Accord- ing to professionals, the “mongrel poetry” of their old-fashioned style had to be exorcised from the literature of history.218 Specifi c aim was taken by professionals at writers such as Irving, Lippard, and Frost, who were lumped together as popularizers who had failed to adhere responsibly to the tenets of historical investigation. Of Irving’s Life and Voyages

68 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6868 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM of Columbus, J. N. Larned’s bibliographic guide noted: “it is only necessary to remark that the progress of critical scholarship and the publication of the sources since Irving’s time have diminished the value of Irving’s work for the student.” Irving had not “draw[n] characters with the realistic fi delity now in favor. He smoothed his portrait of Columbus, and defects are passed over in silence or left obscure in the background.”219 George Lippard and John Frost were among a group of historians J. Franklin Jameson dismissed as propagan- dists for the “popular impulse,” writers of historical literature who acquiesced to “the boastful confi dence, the crude elation, the vociferous patriotism, and the national arrogance” of the midcentury. A work such as Frost’s Popular History could not measure up if judged on the basis of its “profundity and skill of its research, nor on the correctness and completeness of its results, nor even on its qualities of arrangement or style,” Jameson wrote, “so much as on the acceptableness to the national mind of the general idea which it exhibits in regard to the nation’s development.”220 Even by this standard, however, Frost had not passed the test of suffi cient durability. Despite the fact that his works went through twelve editions and were published in seventy-one issues, Frost was ignored altogether by other professional bibliographers, receiving no mention in either Charles Kendall Adams’s A Manual of Historical Lit- erature or Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart’s Guide to the Study of American History.221 Minutes from the earliest meetings of the American Historical Association reveal the extent of this expurgating campaign, which ultimately rendered the efforts of Duyckinck obsolete. At the 1890 annual meeting, for instance, Robert H. Dabney delivered a paper titled “Is History a Science?” in which he answered his own query with a resounding yes.222 Science offered twentieth century professional historians like Dabney “a vision of a comprehensible world: a model of certitude, of unambiguous truth; knowledge that was defi - nite, and independent of the values or intentions of the investigator.” By contrast, works of “pseudo-history” by popularizers such as Lippard and Frost were condemned as fanciful and mythological stories. Students of history must employ “a far stricter and more critical spirit . . . into the investigation of the mere facts of history,” he noted, than was the case with the “long cherished” “delusions” of popularizers who allowed the “obstructing rubbish” of legend to interfere with the honest presentation of the past.223 Association member John William Burgess agreed with Dabney’s assertions, noting that the goal of the educational wing of the AHA platform on history was “to teach the student, fi rst, to distinguish fact from fi ction, how to divest it, as far as possible of coloring or exaggeration.”224 Even John Spencer Bassett, who admitted that there were “a few scholarly men” who at mid-century wrote “some serious

Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 69

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 6969 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM books for the small class of men who could appreciate them,” asserted that “the mass of people demanded something far less respectable. To satisfy them was created a class of books, widely read at the time, which to-day we throw aside as rubbish.” Bassett spoke for most AHA members when he concluded that popular histories like Frost’s “show us in what manner popular taste has limited the performance of the historian.” Such works were part of “a stage of our literary development now happily past,” he argued.225 In scholarly journals such as International Monthly and the American His- torical Review, professional historians continued their assault against the infl uences of fi ction on history writing. In a piece titled “Popular Histories and their Defects,” Robinson rejected the tendency among untrained historians to exaggerate the sensational in their histories. Writers such as Lippard, Frost, and Irving refused to concern themselves “with the normal conduct and serious achievements of mankind in the past,” he wrote, choosing instead to “purposely select the picturesque and the lurid” as their themes. Operating from the misguided assumption that “the more prodigious the occurrences narrated, the better the history,” such amateurs perpetuated the “conception of history as a chronicle of heroic persons and romantic occurrences.” This “craving for the dramatic can be better met by confessed fi ction,” Robinson asserted,” adding “that those who see in history an epic poem give us very imperfect and erroneous notions of the past.” The tendency to emphasize the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself, he noted, constituted a “reckless disregard of perspective” and was an impulse motivated not by historical principle of judgment but by “a consistent anxiety to startle the reader.” The preference of popular writers for certain kinds of materials—“[r]omantic mar- riages and tragic deaths; the doings of poisoners, adulterers, and lunatics; the cases of those who have swallowed needles to fi nd them coming out of unexpected places years after; who have taken laudanum for paregoric, or been run over by beer wagons”—suggests that they were “guilty of gross misrepresenta- tion within the bounds of formal accuracy,” in Robinson’s estimation. “Unvar- nished fi ction would be preferable” to some of what masquerades as popular history, he concluded.226 What motivated professionals in these personal attacks? Marxist historians argue that signifi cant class issues were at play. They assert that members of the American Historical Association were cultural elitists who desired to promote the benefi ts of “high” culture by affi rming the high-minded artistic expressions of scholars and rejecting the terrifying monotony of “mass-produced objects.”227 Others such as Lawrence Levine claim that professionals demonstrated a disturbing exclusivity in their efforts to “purify base democracy,” protecting history, as it were, by encouraging a “sacralization of culture.” According to this

70 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7070 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM argument, the typical professional scholar saw himself “less as a proselytizer of the masses than as a preserver of the faith; a builder of the temple and keeper of the fl ame.” History as a subject was too complex to admit of the kinds of un- tutored and cursory treatments typical of popular historians. What was needed were professionally trained experts who could appreciate fully the sophistica- tion necessary to unlock history’s secrets. Levine has noted that in many areas of cultural experience in the late nineteenth century, professionals advocated for an “approved, sanctifi ed, conspicuous culture” that allowed them to maintain a critical distance from the masses. They established “rigid cultural categories,” which, once in place, “made it so diffi cult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.”228 No matter what the motivation, the campaign was pretty damaging to the reputations not only of Lippard and Frost but also Duyckinck. By the beginning of the twentieth century, professional historians had created the cultural conditions necessary to discredit popular history in a manner that was eventually fatal to its reputation.

As devastating as Duyckinck’s snubbing was to the estimations of the worth of the histories of Lippard and Frost, and as damaging as the attacks of professional historians on Irving would prove to his and Duyckinck’s long-term reputations, it is important to remember that in the mid- to late nineteenth century the dividing line between professional and popular historians was not yet rigidly established. The 1880s and 1890s constituted an important transition era in the history of historical study, and, as with most such “paradigm shifts,” this one was characterized by fi ts and starts, by fl uctuating priorities and altering perspectives. It took many years to work out in the literary marketplace the subtle relationships between popularizers and professional historians, and numerous important conceptual problems were decades away from resolution. An astute observer of trends in historical study, J. Franklin Jameson, recognized that while the old age of popular history was fading away of desirable necessity, the new era of professionalism that was dawning had “some serious drawbacks.” He worried especially about the pernicious effects of professional histories that turned scholars into “cogs or wheels in a history-producing machine” by enlisting dozens of them in a “literary bureau” approach to the past. With the loss of individual authorship, Jameson warned, many of the “fi ner qualities of the individual mind are likely to evaporate in the process,” while “much of what is most valuable in individual views and conceptions of history will fi nd no place for itself.” He believed that “the historian, like the poet, is born, not made,” but he also recognized that the historian “is not made by machinery.”229 Slow, deliberate change was what Jameson advocated. Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 71

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7171 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2412:58:24 PMPM In this fertile period of shifting literary and cultural priorities, there were meaningful attempts to establish a middle ground between the literary proclivities of popularizers and the factual obsessions of scholars. The popular histories of William Cullen Bryant, John Clark Ridpath, Edward Eggleston, Edward S. Ellis, and Julian Hawthorne were transitional works in this regard whose production histories reveal the tensions between pre-professional and professional approaches to the past. Jameson argued that in the gradual conversion from “historical literature” to “historical science,” historians of the popular temperament would be needed for a time to smooth out the rough edges that result from the fact “that the actual march of affairs is far in advance of its expression in literary theory and literary practice.” A lingering tolerance of popular history was justifi ed, therefore, by the axiom that it is “possible to discern in the face of things at present something which may be relied on to shape in part the historical science of the immediate future.”230 And there were isolated examples of popular histories retaining their audiences well into the twentieth century despite the withering attacks of professionals, as in the case of John Clark Ridpath’s History of the World, which demonstrated its staying power in Huey Long’s Winnfi eld, Louisiana, twenty-fi ve years after its publication. To be sure, eventually such works gave way to those more dominant professional forms—monographs, journal articles, and paper presentations—that subverted nearly completely the vernacular forms specifi c to popular history as a literary genre. Some of the most fertile intellectual exchanges occurred, however, in this moment of change. The friction created by this gradual slide in reputation, this “descent from glory,” if you will, bears study for what it can reveal about changing cultural priorities in a historical period of profound transition.

72 } When Popular History Was Popular

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7272 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM It may seem questionable to allow the spheres of the historian and the poet to touch at any point. But it cannot be denied that their activities are related.—Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The Task of the Historian” (1822)

2...... The “Terrible

Image Breaker”

William Cullen

Bryant, Sydney

Gay, and Scribner’s

Hybrid History

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7373 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM “That Noble Gray Head and Beard”

When Charles Knight submitted his eight-volume Popular History of England to the British people in 1856, he dedicated the work to “His Royal Highness, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.” The dedication was unusual given Knight’s assertion in the preface that “History, as it is generally written, deals too exclusively with . . . the acts of sovereigns and statesmen” and should rather embrace a “new point of view”—one that “put the People in the foreground.” It doubtless served as protection against the political risk he took in subordinating the role of the Crown in his narrative. Knight believed that English readers “want to fi nd, in the history of their country, something more than a series of annals, either policy or war”; they “want to learn the history of the English home, as well as the history of the English State.” The term “popular history,” in Knight’s usage, then, meant the attempt to “con- nect domestic matters with the course of public events.” The formula worked brilliantly for Knight, whose dedication and history not only endeared him to the masses but also ingratiated him with Prince Albert’s mother, Queen Victo- ria. She knighted him for his efforts, fueling endless jokes in the British press about the “knighted Knight” or Sir Knight. Facing the tremendous challenge of addressing a complex, class-stratifi ed audience, Knight had developed an “admixture of the individual and the general” suitable enough to allow history to “fi nd the course of its highest duty—popular instruction.”1 He also anticipated methodological changes that would later be labeled “social history.” Readers in the United States who enjoyed Knight’s volumes wondered where the American equivalent to such a balanced history could be found. “We know of no one [American] work which can be placed by the side of Knight’s History of England,” wrote a critic in the New York Times.” “Yet that such a book would be gladly purchased it is impossible to question.”2 The persuasiveness of this suggestion in the New York Times was not lost on the most perceptive American publishers, especially Charles Scribner, who commissioned a “popular history” of the United States in anticipation of the Cen- tennial Celebration in 1876.3 Ensconced originally in a shop at the corner of Nassau Street and Park Row in the busy New York book trade district, Scrib- ner had dedicated himself since 1846 to publishing what he called “scholarly, morally uplifting books with popular appeal.”4 Scribner’s defi nition of the term “popular” seems clear enough in this context, relating primarily to the kind and scope of audiences to be reached. Duyckinck’s Cyclopaedia of American Literature was among the fi rst of these widely circulating projects for common readers. In the area of historical literature, the publisher noted, he desired to contract with authors of established reputations who could produce 74 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7474 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM works of high literary merit that would sell copies to as diverse a population as possible. The prospectus for the proposed Centennial history of the United States announced that the projected volumes “will be POPULAR,” both “complete and compact.” Without “detracting from the dignity of the work as a History,” Scribner’s marketers wrote, the authors “will present the narrative in such a form that it must attract even young readers.”5 The subsequent preface to the volumes served to elaborate the point while recognizing the challenge for all publishers of producing and selling such popular histories. “There are several excellent histories of the United States of North America in print, and it will naturally be asked what occasion there is for another,” the authors noted. They assured readers that like Knight’s Popular History, theirs was “intended to be a popular history—a work for that large class who have not leisure for reading those narratives which aim at setting forth, with the greatest breadth and variety of circumstance, the annals of our nation’s life. At the same time it is the design of the present work to treat the subject more at large than is done in those compends, some of them able in their way, which are used as textbooks in the schools.”6 Such diverse ambitions, they hoped, would justify an expansive publishing venture. The key to achieving this goal for Scribner was to fi nd a writer of suffi cient national reputation to appeal to a wide audience and to convince that writer to work in such a way as to ensure a text that was accessible to nearly all readers. In 1874, the editors at Scribner’s had just such a fi gure in mind when they approached the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant about the project. Bryant was an intriguing and curious choice for the authorship of a Centen- nial history of the United States. On the one hand, Bryant was a logical selection, since he was America’s preeminent literary fi gure, and, as unoffi cial poet laureate of the nation, had wide name recognition. An octogenarian by the mid-1870s, he had been a contemporary of many of the heroes of the young republic. “Born before the death of Washington, Mr. Bryant was in the prime of active life while Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay were exerting an active and powerful infl uence upon politics and legislation,” a circular for Scribner’s history announced. “His life seems to have been spared beyond that of those and others of his distinguished cotemporaries, that he might give fi nal form to this record of our history as a nation up to the close of the fi rst Century of our Independence.” In addition, the circular noted, as editor of the New York Evening Post for fi fty years, Bryant had been “thrown into relations more or less intimate with all the leading men of the time, and as a necessity of his position he has been compelled to keep the history of events fresh in his memory and to form accurate estimates of their relative importance.”7 No one had more of the rich practical experience in the William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 75

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7575 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM world of affairs that many readers demanded of the authors of their popular histories than Bryant. On the other hand, Bryant was an unlikely candidate for the task of writing a popular history of the United States, since he had no formal training in history, and since he was not necessarily recognized as a man of the people. The Dictionary of American Biography notes that while Bryant was perceived as an august, towering fi gure by 1876 and was “everywhere regarded for many years as the leading citizen of New York,” he was “never in any sense popular.” An “austere, chill, precise, and dignifi ed” person, his “demeanor made familiarity impossible, and even in small gatherings he was not a clubbable man.”8 His fi rst biographer, son-in-law Parke Godwin, characterized Bryant as a reluctant public fi gure, torn between his intense desire to infl uence contemporary public opinion and his more acute need for privacy.9 His more recent biographer, Albert F. McLean Jr., has suggested that this emotional dichotomy surfaced professionally in Bryant’s “divided voice”—his willingness to speak out reso- lutely on public themes but in a manner sometimes oddly suited (because too pedantic) for public consumption. To understand Bryant’s unique relationship to his various audiences, McLean noted, one must “reconstruct the sensibility of a poet who consistently shielded himself behind the social masks of his day [and] who treasured the privacy of his gift.”10 His “immense infl uence as a public leader was almost wholly an indirect infl uence,” Allan Nevins agreed. Bryant was a popularizer by association only, one who “reached the minds of those who in turn could reach the masses.”11 Many were simply intimidated by Bryant’s awesome intellect. The normally unfl appable Mark Twain underscored this point when he reminisced with friends about an embarrassing loss of confi dence he experienced in an unexpected meeting with Bryant. The occasion was a lecture that the humorist was delivering to a New York audience. By Twain’s account, the presentation was going “with fl ying colors” until he spotted, near the front row, the “noble gray head and beard” of Bryant. From that moment on, the speech went badly. Evi- dently Twain became discombobulated, lost his place several times, mistimed his jokes, and fi nished prematurely in a fl urry of disconnected fi nal remarks. He blamed Bryant’s intimidating presence for the disaster. “I was sure he saw the failure I was making,” Twain noted, “and all the weak points in what I was saying, and I couldn’t do anything more—the old man just spoiled my work.” When friends tried to console him afterward with assurances that his speech was good, he could only say, “No, no, that fi ne old head spoiled all I had to say that night.”12 The venerable poet rendered America’s greatest humorist hu- morless. Given Bryant’s propensities for intimidating formality and aloofness, the publishers at Scribner’s must have had some doubts about his suitability

76 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7676 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM for such a popular project, although he was unquestionably the best known literary fi gure in America available for the job. Suitability aside, there was also the question of whether or not Bryant could be talked into such an undertaking at his advanced age. As it turned out, the timing of Scribner’s offer could not have been better. In 1874, Bryant had turned 80 years old, and, perhaps sensing that death must break his pen some time soon, the poet determined to become a more accessible public fi gure.13 He not only made an uncharacteristic number of public appearances, he also undertook a series of literary projects designed to make “great scholarship” more available to “popular” readers. For instance, in the 1870s alone, Bryant edited a new collection of Shakespeare’s plays with Duyckinck; he modernized translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and he helped assemble a travel guide for those interested in “seeing” scenic America.14 When the offer came from Scribner’s to produce a popular history of the United States, Bryant expressed concern about how such a work might affect his many other literary projects, but he admitted to a certain fascination with the prospect of making the fi rst one hundred years of American national development understandable to average Americans.15 Scribner, in turn, pushed hard for the association because he believed fervently in Bryant’s potential for creating a “poetics” of popular history. Eventually Scribner wore Bryant down, convincing the poet to participate in the popular history under certain conditions. “I said that, at my time of life, I would not undertake the principal labor of it myself, nor would I undertake the work at all, unless I could have an associate whom I should name,” Bryant wrote.16 Scribner was more than agreeable to this condition, and, by late 1875, Bryant was under contract to produce a multivolume popular history of the United States that would eventually bear his name.17 The production history of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States provides an interesting example of the negotiated quality of popular historical writing in the nineteenth century. Bryant’s fi rst task for Scribner was to write a prospectus for the advertising circular to be used by book agents to sell the volumes by subscription.18 This document and the subsequent preface derived from it suggest the poet’s philosophy of history and the model of literary presentation he intended to use in pursuing it. The Popular History of the United States, Bryant projected, was to be a four-volume compendium of the American past designed for “that large class in this country who seek repose and recreation in general literary culture, but with whom literature is not the business of life.”19 His goals, above all, were to achieve an authorial presence in the text by drawing on his long, personal experience with the events he described and by creating the illusion of participation in those events on the part of readers by employing a series of personalizing narrative devices. As with his poetry, he viewed it as William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 77

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7777 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM Frontispiece to Part One of the subscription series for Bryant’s Popular History.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7878 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM his mission as a historian to fi lter experience through the medium of his public persona, selecting and arranging evidence in accordance with his private artistic preferences.20 Making history accessible to the general reader was a challenge for the erudite Bryant, but one he was anxious to accept. “I write somewhat against the grain,” he admitted to his brother John of the Scribner’s project, “though I think that I have some good thoughts to ventilate.”21 In much of his romantic poetry, Bryant had described history in sentimental and dramatic terms, envisioning the past as an “unrelenting” and “dark domain” in which the citizens of “old empires” struggled in vain to free themselves from the “bolts” and “fetters” of obscurity that compelled them to sit for eternity “in sullenness and gloom.”22 In his preface to the Scribner’s series, Bryant remained true to this romantic spirit, employing the unembarrassed language of Lippard’s nineteenth-century nationalism to describe the highly epic and even mythological progress of liberty from the ancient world to its American fulfi llment. Bryant announced to his readers that he was “writing the history of the only great nation on the globe,” a country gladly forced by destiny to take “its place among the foremost nations of the world.” Those who read his Popular History of the United States, he promised, “will see in [America’s] past, with all its vicissitudes, and with all our own shortcomings, the promise of a prosperous and honorable future, of concord at home and peace and respect abroad” and will recognize “that the same cheerful piety which leads the good man to put his personal trust in a kind Providence, will prompt the good citizen to cherish an equal confi dence in regard to the destiny reserved for our beloved country.”23 With regard to the question of historical agency, at least, Bryant’s proposed history would be consistent with the ambitions of the Young Americans and the American exceptionalism of Frost’s Popular History of the United States. To drive home his point about the dramatic and providential role of Amer- ica in world history, Bryant developed in his prospectus and preface an elaborate theatrical metaphor for organizing the past, emplotting American history as an ongoing high drama of actors and actresses on a grand historical stage. The theater provided a useful structural device for the conveyance of Bryant’s potent message because it condensed sweeping segments of time into fi ve prescribed acts separated by convenient scene changes. “In the two centuries and a half of our existence as an off-shoot of the great European stock, a mighty drama has been put upon the stage of our continent,” Bryant wrote, and that drama has been characterized by central “acts” which it is the historian’s responsibility to help restage. The theater as structural device gave history immediacy by collapsing the distinctions between time and place. Readers of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States could approach the past with William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 79

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 7979 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2512:58:25 PMPM a suspended imagination not unlike that experienced by playgoers who lose themselves in the temporal setting of a theatrical production. “The period of time at which the nation inhabiting the domain of our Republic came into being is so recent,” Bryant wrote, and the connections to its ancient past so clear, “that we may trace its growth with as much distinctness as if we were the contemporaries of its birth.” In a manner resembling the dramaturgical structure of a fi ve-act play, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States promised to chart “with a certain fulness of recital” the distinct climaxes and crises of the episodic development of American history.24 Bryant’s use of theatrical metaphors throughout his prospectus and preface was important for what it revealed of his conception of history as acted events. Bryant had an almost embarrassing reverence for Shakespeare, sharing as he did the British playwright’s sense of the reciprocal relationship between history as drama and drama as history. If we are indeed all actors and actresses strutting and fretting on so many historical stages, as Shakespeare asserted and Bryant affi rmed, then surely Providence had scripted a special and remarkable role for the American people. Part of the effectiveness of his popular history, Bryant therefore knew, depended on the willingness of his readers to enter into its Shakespearean spirit of dramaturgical engagement. This was more easily accomplished among popular audiences in the late nineteenth century than it might be today. Lawrence Levine has suggested that middle-class Ameri- cans in the nineteenth century embraced the British bard because “Shake- spearean drama featured heroes and villains who communicated directly with the audience” and who “left little doubt about the nature of their character or intentions.”25 American readers of “popular” histories demanded a similar transparency, and Bryant did not disappoint. His preface is dominated by monochromatic heroes who speak in clichéd rhetorical asides referencing single-minded principles to American readers anxious to establish their own connections to an idealized past. European discoverers were men of “courage, perseverance, patient endurance of hardship, and ready resources in time of great emergency,” Bryant wrote, who stuck persistently to their divinely or- dained missions. Old World immigrants were “courageous and adventurous” individuals, “unapt to quail before discouragement, and prepared to encounter disaster.” And the American revolutionaries “presented so united a front in resistance to the tyrannical pretensions of the mother country,” that their “common danger . . . , common privations, sufferings, and expedients, [and] common sorrow at reverses and rejoicing at victories” established the groundwork for “a new era with new responsibilities.”26 If the “Great Story” of American history was the metaphoric equivalent of a fi ve-act Shakespearian drama, then Bryant conceived of its climax as the Civil

80 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8080 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM War. In constructing his broad plan for a popular history that would bear his name, Bryant developed an elaborate rationale to explain to readers why a new history of the United States was needed in 1876. He argued, for instance, that the important changes, “political and social, occurring within our Republic, which have an interest for every nation in the civilized world could not be fully written until now” because the issue of slavery had not been adequately resolved. In the great dramatic unraveling of Providence’s script, Americans found themselves cast in the unhappy role of slave owners, and they were forced to play out their parts to the painful but inevitable conclusions implicit in them. The whole history of slavery “lies before us as on a chart,” Bryant wrote, a chart whose fi nal frames depicted the “fi erce contentions and subtle intrigues” of a military drama with epic implications for human development. “Few episodes in the world’s history have been so complete in themselves as this of American slavery,” Bryant added, and “[f]ew have brought into activity such mighty agencies, or occupied so vast a theater, or been closed, although amid fearful carnage, yet in a manner so satisfactory to the sense of natural justice.” Anticipating what Robert Penn Warren later called the “Treasury of Vir- tue,” Bryant constructed the war narratively as a redemptive struggle in which the end of slavery provided the victors with a storehouse of self-righteousness by which to justify their fratricidal activities. The Civil War was “a bloody catastrophe” and a climax of sorts, and “[t]o have broken off the narrative before reaching the catastrophe,” Bryant wrote in keeping with his theatrical metaphor, “would have been like rising from the spectacle of a drama at the end of the fourth act.”27 To tell the climactic story of the Civil War and the years that preceded and an- tedated it, Bryant envisioned a form of presentation that waxed from drama into melodrama. Bryant’s own dramatic tastes were in the direction of high drama, but he was astutely aware that the most “popular” form of theater among the masses in the nineteenth century was melodrama. With its standardized plots, conventional characters, and simplistic morality, melodrama seemed ideally suited to new and old Americans alike. Melodrama swept the nation in the mid-nineteenth century and became one of the dominant mechanisms for the transmission of cultural values.28 Stock fi gures (heroes and villains especially) were introduced by Bryant in his preface in association with anticipated “sensation scenes,” special dramas within the central narrative designed to startle and awaken the audience to the potential dangers inherent in the action.29 The hero strapped to a log being pushed slowly toward a buzz-saw, the heroine lashed to the tracks as a thundering train bears down—these and other devices became sensational conventions that compelled audiences to identify and sympathize with their victims.30 In the projected plans for Bryant’s Popular William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 81

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8181 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM History of the United States, such sensation scenes were tied to the corruptive power of money, a power that he associated with the rise of American slavery. “The history of currency is a sad one,” Bryant wrote with a sense of pathos in his preface, “a history of creditors defrauded, families reduced from competence to poverty, and ragged and hunger-bitten soldiers who were paid their wages in bits of paper scarcely worth more than the coarse material on which their nominal value was stamped.”31 In addition, Bryant’s use of such devices as the “humble home,” the sentimental hero, the dastardly villain, the Gothic setting and the sensation scene was supplemented by the stylistic forms of presentation associated with melodramas—exaggeration, overblown elocution, emotional distress, and bombast. Because the effectiveness of melodrama was directly related to its ability to convey meaning with an economy of language and staging, Bryant relied as consistently as any melodramatist on histrionics and theatricality in his rhetoric. He was especially animated in his negative reactions to the restrictive qualities of high protective tariffs, which he believed were enacted by the monied interests to take advantage of American consumers. A free trade advocate, Bry- ant argued that the Tariff of 1828 contributed signifi cantly to the coming of the Civil War, its most pernicious elements persisting even beyond the 1860s in ways that continued to threaten the Union. The moral of the protective tariff- free trade debate, Bryant noted with sardonic wit, was “that a nation does not always profi t by its own experience, even though it be of an impressive nature.” Bryant’s theatrical posturing in this matter was supplemented by his oratorical evocation of the Gods, the heavens, and celestial warnings in his protests against restrictive trade. Fearing that “our government of nicely balanced powers should degenerate into a mere form, and the proper functions of the States be absorbed into the central authority,” Bryant likened the nation’s fate to “that predicted by some astronomers for our solar system, when the orbs that revolve about the sun, describing narrower and narrower circles, shall fall into the central luminary to be incorporated with it forever.”32 That Bryant was so outspoken in his preface on these political matters suggests something important about the “popular” form of history he intended to write. His claim in the preface, on behalf of Scribner’s Sons, was that the publishers “had endeavored to divest [themselves], while engaged in this task, of all local prejudices, and every infl uence which might affect the impartiality of the narrative.”33 The widely disseminated circular declared Bryant’s Popular History of the United States a “well-balanced and complete narrative” and the fi rst work to treat “the question of slavery, and the political issues North and South, from a really historic point of view . . . without discussion of partisan issues or theories.”34 Bryant’s preface, however, was riddled with opinionated 82 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8282 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM political statements guaranteed to alienate readers of differing views, and he showed little interest in demonstrating the kind of objectivity implied in the advertising materials. The Bryant preface was full of literary trap doors and rhetorical smokescreens intended to create in the narrative rapid transitions from scenes of violence and pathos to those of farce and sensationalism, but there was little evidence of respect for alternative points of view and no mention of the authorities on which the dramatic story was to be based.35 Such discrepancies are evidence that Bryant and Scribner were not always in agreement concerning even to the most basic elements of the projected volumes. Bryant was hopelessly romantic and sentimental at times, and his prospectus revealed troublesome idiosyncracies in his conceptualization of the American past. Yet Scribner contracted with Bryant because the publisher believed that history was a branch of learning in which “the connection between practical experience and contemplative study” was crucial, and because he valued authors “who had spent most of their lives in politics, warfare, theology, bureaucracy, journalism, or literature.” As Theodore Hamerow has noted, “self-taught amateurs” such as Bryant brought to the study of history “a spon- taneous curiosity, an instinctive interest in how the world had become what it was, how society had changed and grown with the passage of time.” They did not always possess “technical expertise or systematic methodology,” but they did share “exuberance, enthusiasm, excitement, and joy in learning.” Even more signifi cant, “their historical writing was informed by a rich practical experience in the world of affairs,” making their works “lively and vibrant, rousing and compelling.” Popular histories written by literary fi gures of substantial public reputation such as Bryant promised to have “the breath of life” about them, while the ability of their authors to tell a “good story” from personal experience—rendered “all the more fascinating because it was true”—seemed likely to redound in the fi nancial favor of the press.36

Chauvinists, Sermonizers, and Gossipmongers

In making selections among potential popular historians, a publisher such as Scribner was forced to acknowledge that their “strengths were also their weaknesses.” As Hamerow has noted, amateurs such as Bryant “displayed in the writing of history the same passions and prejudices, the same interests and predispositions that they revealed in everyday life.” Bryant’s name commanded a certain respect and shielded him a bit from criticism, but popularizers like him were accused of being “jingoes and chauvinists celebrating the virtues of their class, their nation, or their race,” while others were characterized as nothing William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 83

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8383 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM more than “moralists and sermonizers preaching that divine Providence had decreed the eternal submission of the lower classes to the established order.” Still others were condemned as “simply tattletales and gossipmongers specializing in amusing anecdotes or scandalous revelations about those in higher places.” For their part, writers such as Bryant felt as if they were “fi ghting a losing rear-guard action against what they considered dry-as-dust pedantry that would stifl e the creative spirit with footnotes and bibliographies.”37 In turn, publishers such as Scribner’s recognized that while readers of popular histories expected authors to lighten the burden of national problems by casting them in sometimes trivialized “tragic/comic” forms, they also demanded that serious attention be given to the factual underpinnings of those forms. History could be sensationalized in the manner of novels, but it could not be contrived. The rising authority of science in the late nineteenth century as well as a growing literary preference for realism meant that works dependent largely on narrativity, plot and rhetorical effect were viewed with growing discontent by those who preferred “authorial invisibility” and “rigid self-elimination.” By the 1870s, Novick has noted, scientifi c realism was enough of a major selling point, even in the popular book market, that popularizers such as Bryant—who “told” in an era that increasingly preferred its writers to “show”—were encouraged by publishers to fi nd ways to provide at least some of “the sober narration that an age of self-restraint demanded of its historians.”38 Bryant, who seems to have understood his limitations in this regard, addressed these problems by bringing to the project the more balanced scholarly vision of his friend and long-time editor of the New York Tribune, Sydney Howard Gay.39 A fellow journalist, Gay was the octogenarian’s fi rst choice for the “associate” designated in his contract with Scribner’s Sons because Gay had a reputation as a writer with “clear insight into the political as well as the moral issues of his day.” Before the Civil War, Gay had served as editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, and he was later managing editor of the New York Tri- bune during the Civil War, where he was responsible among other things for curtailing the excesses of the paper’s outspoken editor, Horace Greeley. Even- tually Gay became a coeditor with Bryant at the New York Evening Post, and it was there that they established the groundwork for the close working relationship that came to fruition in the Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. Gay was charged with curbing the overstatements to which Bryant and his staff were sometimes prone, especially on fi scal policies. “To the audiences whose respect he commanded through his balanced editorials,” wrote a biographer, Gay “presented in forceful argument the highest ideals for the advancement and integrity of his country.”40 The advertising circular for Bryant’s Popular History of the United States referred to Gay fairly as one who had “long been

84 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8484 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM distinguished in literary circles for careful and conscientious work, rare culture, and a style unexcelled for purity and eloquence.”41 Additionally, Gay had a reputation for getting things done. Scribner’s had assumed initially that Bryant would be responsible for much of the writing of the Popular History of the United States, but quickly it became evident that the august fi gure was simply too busy (and too old, perhaps) to give the project his full attention. Conversely, Gay was willing to abandon most of his journalistic responsibilities in order to write the history if Scribner’s would compensate him appropriately. Eventually a compromise was reached in which Gay was given primary charge of the text of the volumes, while Bryant confi ned himself to writing the preface and correcting proofs. “The real hard work of writing this history itself is to be done by Mr. Gay,” Bryant admitted to his brother John, “but [it] is all to pass through my hands.”42 “Everything in regard to the composition is done on consultation with me,” Bryant added; “every sentence that goes to press . . . will undergo my rigid revision, and the whole will be published under my responsibility.”43 The most truthful indicator of the popular history’s authorship can be found in the fi nancial compensation each received for his part in the work. Gay was guaranteed 5 percent of the sales of the volumes, which he took in the form of advances, roughly $400 a month for the length of the project, while Bryant received only half that percentage.44 Scribner eventually advanced Gay over $34,000 for work as the chief writer of the volumes, suggesting the publisher’s confi dence in the journalist and his expectation that Bryant’s Popular History of the United States would be a considerable money- maker.45 Bryant was advertised in Scribner’s prospectus and subscription fl yers as the primary author of the volumes, although his eventual contributions to the series proved more limited than even Scribner or Gay had imagined.46 The personal papers of Bryant and Gay (archived in the Columbia Univer- sity Archives and the New York Public Library) provide a fascinating look at how composite histories are constructed through a subtle process of negotiation and compromise. What we fi nd in the collaborative arrangement between these coauthors is the origin of distinctions between ways of historical knowing that have characterized the debate over popular history ever since. Promo- tional messages tucked into salesman’s dummies for Bryant’s Popular History noted that the “journalistic experience of both these men has educated them to speak directly, vigorously, and forcibly, so that what they say must compel listeners,” but it was clear that it was Bryant’s poetic sensibilities to which the advertisers referred primarily when they claimed that the volumes demonstrated “literary skill” that “is suffi cient assurance of a graphic and picturesque narrative which shall attract readers of all classes and ages.” Bryant insisted on forms of history that were didactic, that instructed readers, especially in William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 85

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8585 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM the areas of contemporary politics. It was Gay who was responsible for the pledge “that as a History the work shall be an authority, for its chronological correctness and its accurate statement of facts.” Scribner’s had Gay in mind when it noted in its circulars: “It is the aim to present without partiality, without passion, and with perfect candor, the story of the only great nation on the face of the globe whose history from the beginning is unclouded with myths, or conjectures, or uncertain traditions, but is matter of clear record.”47 Yet as publishers at Scribner’s Sons knew, it was diffi cult to adjudicate between these two forms of history, the mythic and the realist; indeed, some thought them philosophically incompatible. The interesting challenges that this collaborative approach posed were evidenced as soon as Gay received an advanced copy of a draft of Bryant’s preface. The prospectus on which the preface was based had been circulating among book agents since early 1875, but Gay had not seen either until he had already begun working on the fi rst chapters. He was concerned immediately upon reviewing the materials. Noting that Bryant’s introduction was written “before the subject had taken a complete & defi nite shape in my own mind, or, at least, had assumed the sharp lines of a working plan,” Gay asked his coauthor: “Would it not now be possible, without too much trouble to you, to so modify the introduction that it shall-fi t-in to the plan of the work as you see it in the chapters you have read?”48 He was especially concerned that the prospectus promised an attention to social and cultural history that Gay did not think would be refl ected in the fi nished version of the work. “The American of the present day wants to know how his ancestor lived, how he looked, what clothes he wore, on what he fed, what were his daily walk and conversation, and how life dealt with him,” Bryant had written in the prospectus, adding: “This is the most diffi cult part of history to reproduce accurately, but it is after all that which gives us the clearest and most vivid insight into the spirit of the past.” Gay was anxious to restrict the excesses of this social and cultural “spirit,” however, and to stay focused on the “most important events in the history of the nation.”49 Bryant and Gay met throughout the Centennial year to hammer out a middle ground between their two positions. With regard to Bryant’s draft of the introduction, they agreed that the preface to the fi rst volume had circulated too widely among book agents to be excluded from the series, so it would be signed only by Bry- ant. The preface to the second volume was to bear both of their names to refl ect its collaborative origins. “It must have your signature—that is indispensable,” Bryant wrote his coauthor.50 The stylistic and content area discrepancies between the two authors were harder to work out. Gay, who wrote nearly every word of the fi rst draft of volume one, was clearly the primary author on the project, while Bryant was

86 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8686 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM content to make editorial suggestions after the fact. In his critiques, Bryant sought to add dramatic scope and sentimentality to Gay’s understated prose, while Gay tried hard to control Bryant’s poetic and melodramatic impulses. As a lecturer on the abolitionist circuit in the 1850s, Gay had objected to the histrionics of some of his fellow speakers and declared a lifelong aversion to bombastic literary expressions, even if delivered on behalf of a worthy cause.51 Gay also understood the limitations inherent in the structure of melodrama as a genre. “[I]n the act of imposing structure on the seeming randomness of events,” George Forgie has written, melodrama “distorted the passing scene in crucial ways.” By viewing the world as a Manichean contest between virtue and vice, sentimentalizers such as Bryant had “grossly simplifi ed complex problems and lent support to the idea that all adverse change was ultimately caused by the malevolence of a few individuals rather than anything grander, less personal, or beyond the control of the will and efforts of good men.” In characterizing “virtue as unfailingly triumphant,” in other words, they “encouraged an optimistic view of events that permitted people to take a passive stance toward them, and to doubt that the crisis must be taken altogether seriously.”52 According to Gay, such depictions did a disservice to the very popular audiences Bryant and other historians wished to inspire to political action. Certainly they proved counterproductive to Bryant’s announced intentions in the preface to equip a new generation “with what wisdom” its members might need for entering “a new era with new responsibilities.”53 Given these constraints, Gay hoped to introduce a steadier literary voice to the project, making concessions to Bryant’s heightened poetic style only when the latter insisted on it. “[W]e aim not to make a dry record of mere annals, but rather to preserve, wherever it is found, that fl avor of romance and adventure in the American past,” Gay wrote; but he added quickly that the volumes would strive for “accuracy and comprehensiveness” in all things and would avoid “mere novelties” and the purely “sensational” at all costs.54 These adjustments occurred in accordance with a gradually and carefully honed editorial procedure worked out between the two authors throughout the early months of the writing. Gay sent manuscript chapters to Bryant; Bryant then commented on them and sent them back for corrections.55 Occasionally, diffi cult sections were worked out in one- or two-day excursions to Bryant’s home in Roslyn, Long Island.56 Then Gay forwarded chapters along to Scribner’s for further editorial comment and, eventually, typesetting. Most of these exchanges were cordial and businesslike. “I have looked over your fi rst three chapters of the History of the United States, and think it admirably well done,” Bryant wrote Gay with reference to chapters on geological foundations of the Continent and the Mound Builders of the Midwest. “I cannot venture to make any material William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 87

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8787 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2612:58:26 PMPM suggestions in regard to it,” he noted.57 In another instance, Bryant wrote: “You have told the story . . . in a picturesque manner, and in such a way as to give it an air of novelty.”58 In many of these cases, Bryant deferred to Gay on matters of factual documentation, admitting that “only someone like you” who “has made a previous study of the subject” could adequately address the more theoretical aspects of the work. When it came to questions of research, Bryant acknowledged, “you almost always get the better of me.”59 As this interchange implies, generally Bryant was content to submit to Gay’s judgments regarding “realistic” detail in the narrative, although he was often less willing to make concessions in stylistic areas. Initially this collaborative arrangement between Bryant and Gay worked smoothly enough, although the constant need to submit and resubmit chapters meant that the fi rst volume of this hybrid history was not published until late 1876 and the second not until 1878. This delay ensured that other works captured the lion’s share of the centennial market for popular history, a disappointment to the publisher, to be sure, although Scribner hoped that there would be suffi cient interest in a project of such obvious integrity to sustain public demand for a slower-paced and increasingly expensive work.60 More rather than less consultation followed, however. The annotated manuscript pages for the early drafts of Bryant’s Popular History as well as the personal correspondence between Bryant and Gay reveal the extraordinary degree to which their history continued to be “constructed,” its chapters and central themes constituting a series of distinct editorial compromises. These archival materials also suggest the important philosophical questions that informed these exchanges concerning popular and scholarly approaches to the past. Can historical “reality” as defi ned by scholars ever be presented meaningfully in the story-telling forms employed by popularizers and preferred by readers? Does narrativity require a commitment to ordering strategies that by defi nition corrupt the historical record? And what are the theoretical and practical implications of attempts to do so? In many ways, the fi rst volume of Bryant’s Popular History came the closest of any to meeting Scribner’s expectations for a collaborative popular history, although it was hardly a seamless production. The book began with sensationalist images of the age of discovery that bore the stamp of Bryant. In an introductory chapter on primeval America, the authors speculated imaginatively and somewhat recklessly about the “naked savages” who inhabited the primitive continent, ancient “troglodytes” with “small brains” but of enormous strength who pursued “great and strange animals” for their food. They also introduced several mythological interpretations of the pre-Columbian explorations of the Americas, sketching imaginative literary depictions of “mythic explorers” who 88 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8888 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM ventured forth on a “Sea of Darkness,” “whose mysterious waters, they did not doubt, in accordance with the belief of the time, were concealed in perpetual night, haunted by demons, and fi lled with strange creatures of monstrous shapes.” In addition, they incorporated Icelandic sagas into their text—“re- citals of history” that were, they recognized, “exaggerated and adorned,” yet substantially grounded in facts—as well as discussions of Welsh and Chinese claims of discovery, which, though “legendary and romantic,” allowed readers to “profi tably and properly go further back than the ordinary starting-point by fi ve hundred years.” Such imaginative projections “are not history,” the authors admitted, but they merited inclusion in the work because “it is not impossible that in them may yet be found some aid in putting together that unwritten story of the early human race in this continent.”61 The poet-jouranlist was the moving force behind these speculative passages in Bryant’s Popular History, as Gay was on record at Scribner’s as preferring more “scientifi c and historical proof” to such imaginative forays. The “shadowy form” of the people who predated Europeans is best understood not through imaginative depictions, Gay argued, but through a scientifi c study of the relics and material artifacts they left behind. Archeologists had done much “to dispel the obscurity and mystery which . . . shrouded the New World in darkness,” he added as a corrective, noting that “Modern science” promised to rewrite the “story of races and of civilization that long since disappeared, leaving no other record than those relics which till recently have been either overlooked or misunderstood.”62 Gay’s assertions worried some at Scribner’s who feared they might anger traditionalists, and the publisher warned Gay that a popular history must “offend no theological prejudices or beliefs.” But Gay countermanded that archaeological evidence “shed[s] fresh light” on “the pre-historic character of the Western Hemisphere” and provides startling insights that “history ought not to ignore.” In a private note to Bryant, Gay elaborated on his thinking with reference to race origins: “At fi rst I showed how modern archaeology set aside the accepted Biblical chronology & how the believers have attempted to reconcile these new facts with the old belief,” he noted. “Then I rewrote it; leaving the reader to make his own deductions if he chooses & to hold the facts & not the argument of the book responsible. . . . It has cost me a great deal of labor and anxiety . . . because much study was required to make it scientifi cally accurate & beyond criticism,” he noted, but the result of such thoroughness was “a story never before told in any popular work, & one which the general reader only knows about in a general way” and which represents a “new departure for American History.” Although Scribner was at fi rst “a little anxious about the theological aspect of the fi rst chapter,” Gay assured Bryant that eventually he would be “eminently satisfi ed.”63 William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 89

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 8989 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM Gay viewed it as his special role in the editorial process to advance the narrative from what one reader described as Bryant’s “mythical, and to some extent visionary, prelude” to the more “solid ground of fact.”64 In introducing the “scientifi c element” to popular history, therefore, Gay felt obliged to debunk those more imaginative historians who had preceded him in the fi eld, especially Washington Irving. Some of the highly romanticized imagery of Irving’s portrait of Columbus made its way into the pages of Bryant’s Popular History, as when the authors highlighted the “power of magic” that informed Columbus’s “poetic temperament and . . . vivid imagination,” the discoverer’s “divine mission” having been inspired by the revelations and “saving infl u- ence of the Catholic Church.”65 Such visionary interpretations seemed oversentimentalized even to Bryant, however, who confessed to Gay his anxieties about borrowing too consistently from Irving’s overblown prose. “In reading Irving’s Life of Columbus,” Bryant noted, “I have always felt that there was an air of romantic unreality in the coloring of his narrative, or at least in some part of it.”66 This admission encouraged Gay to add a steadier, more realistic voice to the idealistic, Irvingesque description of the discoverer. While Columbus was “a most diligent student of the Bible” and its “prophecies,” Gay wrote, he was also a disciple of the “everlasting truths of science” and was devoted to “the logic of the sphere.” Detailing the “special scientifi c facts” Columbus presented before the Council of Salamanca, Gay asked readers to consider alternatives to the supernatural preconceptions Irving and Frost had forced upon them.67 As he explained to Bryant, Gay believed that readers of popular history were capable of making their own decisions about such matters if presented with the proper facts.68 Bryant agreed in principle, responding to his coauthor that “[t]he truth must be told as you have told it nakedly, in such a manner that the readers of history will have no diffi culty in making up their minds as to the moral quality of the act.”69 Such an exchange suggested the degree to which Bryant and Gay were inching toward a realist position with respect to objectivity and the authority of facts. But the former author was far more reluctant to travel quickly down that path than the latter. In choosing to debunk earlier “speculative” historians like Irving, Bryant feared that he and Gay were challenging an implied maxim within the genre of popular history, namely, that one should never tinker too dramatically with the myths of the people. The result of such irreverence must be a reduction in popularity of the volumes and of their sales, Bryant reasoned, and excessive debunking was not satisfying from an intellectual point of view, either. Gay’s treatment of John Smith was especially revealing in this regard, Bryant argued, since Smith’s American “origin narrative” occupied a special place in the American historical imagination.70 In the chapters he penned on 90 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9090 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM the founding of Jamestown, Gay admitted Smith was a “[c]ourageous, enterprising, and energetic” fi gure, but he reminded readers that the fl amboyant leader was also inclined “to make himself . . . more the hero of the early history of Virginia than the facts seem always to warrant.” The clearest example of Smith’s untrustworthiness as a historian of his own career was his description of Pocahontas’s intervention in his own execution, an episode, Gay noted, that was mentioned in no other contemporary source except Smith’s General History and represented a sample of the dubious “exaggeration which distin- guishes the Smith narrative.”71 Bryant was less sure of the truth or the value of Gay’s skeptical critique of the Virginia colonizer, and he was reluctant to give ground on a heroic Smith as the two coauthors worked through subsequent drafts of the chapter. He claimed that in so vigorously exploding the Smith mythology, Gay had tampered with the sacred myths central to the life of a culture. “[Y]ou are a terrible image breaker,” he told Gay; “[y]ou smashed that beautiful image of Pocahontas interposing to save Captain Smith from the numerous savages into fragments so small that they will never be put together again.” Noting that Gay’s research into other contemporary sources had failed to “impugn the veracity of Smith himself,” Bryant preferred the argument of William Gilmore Simms that the poetic Poca- hontas fable should be accepted on Smith’s authority alone.72 For his part, Gay was unwilling to recognize Smith’s narrative as “an established historical fact,” even if, as Bryant had argued, historians such as Simms had embraced it “as the best, as it is the fullest, of the contemporary narratives of the adventures of the Jamestown colonists for the fi rst two years.” Gay explained to Bryant: “My aim is to make [the Popular History] an entirely new & original work, & so far it is written on original authorities without regard to, & with the most trifl ing aid, if any at all, from the standard histories. It seems to me important that it should be clearly understood that we have not in the least followed, & do not propose to follow, any beaten path; but that this treatment of the early period is fresh, presenting very much [that] which methinks could only be found in special or old books, only known to scholars.”73 This insistence on originality and scholarly rigor also prompted Gay in his earliest drafts of the manuscript to deviate from the standard interpretations of Dutch culture in New York. Gay admired the Dutch as a people who in Eu- rope “had been busy for centuries in redeeming foot after foot of swamp, and marsh, and submerged land, and surrounding the fertile territory thus gained with dikes and defenses against the ocean.” But these industrious habits did not carry over to the Dutch New Netherlands settlement in America, where economic pettiness and abusive rule doomed the colony. The irresponsible actions of an “imbecile” leader like Wouter Van Twiller were so glaring, Gay William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 91

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9191 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM noted, that “the gravity of the few records of the time is occasionally enlivened by narratives which might almost seem exaggerations in the pages of Diedrich Knickerbocker.”74 In referencing Knickerbocker, Gay distinguished once again between his form of historical realism and Washington Irving’s sentimentality. As he had with John Smith, Gay chose to debunk Irving’s maudlin depictions of the Dutch, and the original drafts of the chapters on the New Netherlands colony were highly condemnatory. Indeed, Bryant referred to them as “deprecatory and jeering” in tone.75 In his private correspondence with Gay, Bry- ant urged a more compassionate portrait, agreeing in spirit with comments articulated later by J. Franklin Jameson that Irving’s humorous portrayal of the Dutch “made it permanently difﬁ cult for the American public to take a serious view of these early Dutch days. Oloffe the Dreamer and Walter the Doubter, Abraham with the ten breeches and Stuyvesant with the wooden leg, have become too thoroughly domesticated among us to admit of that.”76 Americans had certain expectations for the Dutch as historical ﬁ gures, Bryant alleged, and it wouldn’t do to challenge these myths too thoroughly, even in the name of mature and sober scholarship. Gay, who had found after exhaustive research in contemporary sources that the history of New Netherlands was dull and depressing, promised Bryant that he would introduce more of the ridiculing tone of Irving as a way of giving “some color” to an otherwise “very base, bald & dull synopsis of well-known history.”77 He did so, however, in ways that inverted the Knickerbocker formula. Like Wash- ington Irving, Gay presumed satire to be an appropriate trope for dealing with the excesses of the Dutch explorers. But unlike Irving, who satirized the Dutch as a way of increasing the comedic effect of his narrative, Gay used the device to underscore the tragic realities of a misguided community. “The pages of Knicker- bocker’s History rather reproduce than caricature . . . the early Dutch colonists,” Gay noted, and when stripped of their farcical narrative structure tell a startlingly realistic and disparaging story.78 “The truth is I had to restrain myself from presenting an absurd picture of the Dutch rule,” Gay wrote Bryant, and “it is surprising how little Irving had to parody it in his Knickerbocker.”79 Bryant, in turn, felt that Gay had misconstrued Knickerbocker’s form of satire as tragic rather than comic, and he urged his coauthor to alter some of his most biting comments about New Netherlands as a concession to sensitivities of Dutch readers, especially in New York City.80 This Gay did, although he made it clear to Bryant that he felt a more honest treatment of the subject would bear out his conclusions. In a conciliatory note he quipped wryly: “With the changes you suggest I think it will not be offensive to the most thin-skinned of our Dutchmen.”81 There was less disagreement between Bryant and Gay regarding the proper assessment of other nationalities in colonial America. Both authors agreed that

92 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9292 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM the Spanish had been reprehensible in every way, and Gay took numerous opportunities in the manuscript to claim that colonizers from Spain were of a truly inferior stock. In a private letter, Bryant reminded Gay that the Spanish may have been no more bigoted than the French, although on the assumption that two wrongs do not make a right, he acceded to the condemnatory tone of Gay’s anti-Spanish remarks.82 The true heroes among European colonists in both Bryant’s and Gay’s depictions were the British, whose “destiny” it was, they argued, “to possess the land.”83 In submitting a draft of a chapter on the Pilgrims at Plymouth, for instance, Gay wrote to an agreeable Bryant that the Separatists were worthy of high praise. “As to the Pilgrims . . . I think I am, perfectly impartial. I can only see in their story those staid, earnest, religious, simple & strong men whom I have tried to portray.”84 In The Popular History, Gay heralded the perseverance, diligence and steady convictions of these religious dissenters, painting a truly heroic word portrait of a people who arrived in the worst season possible with weather that “was so cold that the sea-spray, as it fell upon those exposed in the open shallop, encased them, as it were, in armor of ice.”85 Yet even here, at his most sentimental, Gay encouraged readers to resist over-romanticizing the Pilgrims. In discussing the disembarkation of the Sepa- ratists on Cape Cod, for instance, Gay focused on the rather “commonplace” demeanor of the “[s]eventeen rough men” whose unassuming landing on American shores had been transformed into a historical “epoch” by fi liopietistic citizens. The glorifi cation of Plymouth Rock, whose symbolic meaning is “commemorated by the descendants of the Pilgrims, wherever they are found, on the anniversary of a day when the event did not occur,” Gay wrote, distorts the truth about the landing, as does “the general supposition that on that day the people of the Mayfl ower landed from the ship upon the Rock of Plymouth—which they certainly did not do until a fortnight later.” When we consult the “cold, bare records of ordinary facts,” Gay noted, we discover that “[a]ll the romantic interest that tradition lends to the landing of the Pilgrims came later,” and that this fi rst coming ashore was a rather mundane affair. Mary Chilton and John Alden were not the fi rst to step upon Plymouth Rock as New England mythology alleged, according to Gay. “Neither of those persons is named in the list, which professes to be a full one, of those who in the shallop, on the fi fth of December, discovered the bay of Plymouth; and certainly no woman could have been upon such an expedition,” he wrote. “Nor is it likely that any woman went on shore in the stormy weather, after the arrival of the Mayfl ower in the harbor on the 16th, till the general visit was made on the 25th to the selected spot.”86 Gay was still less sentimental and forgiving about the Puritans at Massa- chusetts Bay, who, in his estimation, were more intolerant than their Pilgrim

William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 93

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9393 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM neighbors at Plymouth. “These men had come into the wilderness to build up a theocracy, and made no pretensions of securing liberty for anybody but themselves,” he wrote. “They were quite as intolerant of opinions that were not their own as the most inexorable persecutor that ever ‘peppered’ a Puritan.” The persecutions of Roger Williams and the Quakers of Boston were prime examples of the lack of humanity in Puritan Massachusetts. The Puritans lived to punish, Gay noted with Hawthornian determiniation, and “might therefore be imagined as pining while heresy was inactive”; if so, they were revived thoroughly by dissenters, using against them with curious short-sightedness “the pillory, the brandishing-iron, the whipping-post, and the ear-shears, from whose expansive cruelties they had escaped beyond the sea.” Governor Endi- cott viewed the twice-weekly whippings of imprisoned Quakers as a “private luxury,” while the executions of female Quakers like Mary Dyer were conducted with “a revolting sameness.” Gay added in a condemnatory tone that the Puritans were unworthy of a more generous assessment. “Making every possible allowance for the strength of religious convictions, and for the sensitiveness of political relations still inchoate and experimental, it is hard to feel any other excuse than that which may be given for any religious bigotry for this persecution of a handful of harmless people, whose numbers were too few to be dangerous, and whose doctrines were too abstruse, if not absolutely too unmeaning, to admit of that number being ever seriously increased. . . . No glimmer of merciful relenting, no ray of pitiful compassion, soften or relieve the cruel and sombre gloom of this page in the history of Massachusetts.”87 When Bryant fi rst read in draft form Gay’s depiction of the Puritans, he was concerned by its pointed quality, not just in terms of its negative portrayal of the Puritans but with regard to its attack on the more charitable treatments of rival historians as well. In a footnote on Roger Williams, for instance, Gay had singled out for specifi c criticism the recent work of Henry M. Dexter, the author of several apologetic articles on the treatment of religious dissidents by Puritan magistrates.88 Bryant, who had a professed aversion to scholarly controversy, strongly recommended that this personal attack on Dexter be dropped.89 Gay was reluctant, however, for reasons that related to his desire to emphasize historical accuracy over sectional partisanship. “There is an historical school—so to speak—spring[ing] up in Massachusetts whose object is to defend the Puritans as the wisest & best of men, who never did & never could do wrong,” Gay noted to his coauthor. “Of this school Dr. Dexter is the chief apostle & to make the defense good history must be falsifi ed & everybody who reads it in the light of actual facts is to be denounced as a fool.” Arguing that “Dexter’s work on Williams is the work of a bigot,” Gay condemned it as “full of unfairness & fabrication” as well as “a constructive argument for a defi nite 94 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9494 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM end, not a seamless reading of history.” Dexter was so anxious “to establish the perfect character of the Boston Puritans,” Gay noted, that he felt compelled to “show that Williams was a nuisance, a fanatic offensive to all that is good in Church & State, a visionary eaten up by self-conceit, one properly punished as dangerous to the peace of society.” Gay defended his less admiring interpretation to Bryant by insisting that “candid and truthful history can neither wink out of sight nor palliate the intolerance and cruelty which they visited upon those who differed from them.”90 Despite the persuasive logic of Gay’s arguments, Bryant urged him to remove the offensive footnote. The tone of this request refl ected a growing concern on the part of Bryant that Gay’s enthusiasm for picking scholarly fi ghts with other historians on small matters of interpretation revealed a creeping professionalism that threatened the popular nature of their joint enterprise. Acknowledg- ing that Dexter was short-sided in his view of the Puritans, Bryant nonetheless surmised that “it does not seem to me well to go beyond that and pronounce sentence on him,” since Gay’s proposed footnote expressed an “excessive acri- mony” and that might “naturally provoke a controversy.” As was typical of most popular historians, Bryant was reluctant to engage in historiographic battles, cautioning Gay that his footnote was tantamount “to a charge of willful falsehood, and I don’t wish to be answerable for that.” Scribner had hired them “to write the history of the United States,” he reminded Gay, “not to show that Dr. Dexter’s work is a falsifi cation of history.”91 For his part, Gay defended the footnote as a hedge against the criticism of revisionists who would undoubtedly review the fi rst volume of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. “I want to tell the truth about the Boston Puritans & the Rhode Island people,” Gay insisted, as a way of challenging the authority of “the new school” whose fi liopiety he disdained.92 Eventually Gay relented, eliminating from the objectionable footnote all references to Dexter’s errors of judgment. “You are, no doubt, quite right about the notes in the Rhode Island chapters,” Gay conceded to Bryant in a refl ective moment that reveals the spirit of compromise pervading the collaborative enterprise. “They had a large query in my own mind as to whether they were quite wise. Not that they are untrue or too severe, but whether this was the place for them.” Gay explained contritely: “Dexter will be sure to do all he can to injure the book,” he warned, “& I only hoped to draw his fi re and render him harmless.”93 Bryant congratulated Gay for his more mature, even-handed approach. “I am glad that you have delivered up your victim Dr. Dexter, with so good a grace,” the poet wrote in response. “You have proved him to be in the wrong without calling him a liar.” Importantly, Bryant defended his coauthor’s right to challenge falsifi ers of facts: “As to the facts, you know me well William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 95

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9595 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2712:58:27 PMPM enough to be sure that I would have them related without disguise, and that if they are unpleasant to any body, I look at the matter in this light—that the fault is in the facts and not in him whose business it is to relate them.” But Bryant also admitted that such a personalized attack as that proposed by Gay on Dex- ter would have caused him “many moments of discomfort.”94 Disagreements such as these over matters of emphasis and argument between Bryant and Gay remind us of the negotiated quality of the historical writing and cut to the heart of the competing visions of history among popularizers and professionals. Sentimental in his outlook and captivated by virtues of popular heroes, Bryant provided generous assessments of adventurers that did not threaten the accepted myths of the American people. Less enamored of traditional heroes and more polemical in style, Gay called for franker treatments that sometimes debunked those adventurers as a way of exposing the superfi cialities of national mythologies and the incompetencies of some historical investigators. For his part, Charles Scribner was content to allow the two coauthors to work out their differences of opinion, although he had a fi - nancial stake in seeing that the history reached as wide an audience as possible and was predisposed, therefore, toward Bryant’s more generous and popular assessments. “In spite of its completeness the History is not weighed [down] with useless comment,” Scribner reminded readers in a broadside advertising the work, “and its chief aim is to tell one of the most dramatic stories in the annals of the world, in the simplest, most accurate and most vivid way.”95 The distinctions between Bryant’s sentimental manner and Gay’s realist proclivities were evidenced best in their differing treatments of Native Ameri- cans. Gay was inclined to argue that despite certain lapses into inevitable savagery, Native Americans were innocent, curious, confi ding and largely victimized by whites who “intensif[ied] the weakness which distinguished them as savages.” Gay admitted that some Indians who fought in the Pequot War of the late 1630s did so for the sole purpose of seeking bloody revenge against white intruders. But most acted out of justifi able desperation provoked by a “terrible dilemma,” namely, that they must either fi ght to the death these “pale- faced strangers” or turn their backs forever “upon the beloved land where the bones of their ancestors were buried.” It was the Puritans, in Gay’s estimation, who exhibited the more contemptible behavior during the Pequot War, as in the unprovoked attack on the fort of Chief Miantonomo, where the idea “that the weaker—the very young, the very old, and the women—should escape, was impossible” for the Puritans to accept, and where “the stronger, if not driven back to suffocation and torture in the smoke and fl ames of their own homes, could only throw themselves desperately upon the swords of the unyielding circle of steady Englishmen, or meet beyond a still more impenetrable circle of 96 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9696 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM their own countrymen inexorable as death and more cruel than fi re.” Rather than genocidal extermination, Gay argued, the better policy would have been to Christianize the natives; but the “work of killing was far more successful than that of converting,” moralized Gay, “and their utter extinction, though gradual, was certain.”96 Bryant once again objected to Gay’s harsh approach to the Puritans in this matter of their treatment of Native Americans. In a private letter penned after he had read Gay’s assessment of the Pequot War in draft form, Bryant defended the Puritans in their actions against Miantonomo, rejecting Gay’s reading that they acted wrongly out of religious fanaticism. He once again urged his co author to soften his position. “If on considering what I have said you see no cause to speak of any possible extenuation of [Puritan] conduct I hope you will at least give them the benefi t of the probable motive in a note or some other way,” wrote Bryant.97 Gay thought over the suggestion and late in the preparation of the manuscript did add a few mollifying remarks more conciliatory toward the Puritans, but he did so out of respect for Bryant the man rather than Bryant the historian. Reminding his co-author that such changes in proof pages were “expensive” to make, Gay added deferentially that the cost “is of little moment if it now meets with your approbation.”98 But in this as in most other editorial matters, Gay believed he was right, and his debunking point of view prevailed in those segments of the book in which Puritan behavior was examined most thoroughly. “I had rather not tell any unpleasant truths about them if history would let me off,” Gay explained to Bryant. Citing his own ancestral relationships to John Cotton and Increase Mather, Gay insisted that if history justifi ed a more charitable depiction he would be happy to appease his relatives by narrating such. But he noted that most historians (including Savage, Hildreth, and Bancroft) took “much the same tone” as he had. No historian except Palfrey “ventures to defend the course pursued by the Puritans,” Gay wrote, adding that “Palfrey always defends whatever they do” and “does not hesitate to falsify evidence to that end.” By contrast, Gay proclaimed self- righteously, “I try to write real history, not to manufacture it.”99 This last statement was not strictly true. Occasionally Gay did tolerate the “manufacturing” of a little history, if the implications were not too profound for the scholarly integrity of the popular volumes. During the drafting process of the Popular History, for instance, Bryant received many notes from expectant readers who had seen the circulars promoting the volumes and who wished to lobby for special consideration of one sort or another for their ancestors. Generally Bryant passed these “petitions” along to Gay with notations either endorsing or rejecting the requests. The grandson of much-maligned General William Hull wished to have his relative exonerated for the surrender of Detroit William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 97

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9797 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM in the War of 1812, noting that the most prominent historian of the case “now fully vindicates his course.”100 Gay obliged Bryant in this more generous assessment of Hull, writing that the general was caught in the “stern confl ict between the sense of soldierly duty and the feelings of a humane man and a father,” and “the soldier yielded.”101 But Gay was not always so accommodating, especially if he felt historical accuracy was at stake. In another instance, for example, Bry- ant wrote Gay asking if a special mention could be made in the history on behalf of a friend, Dr. T. Apoleon Cheney, for his role in calling the fi rst meeting of the Republican Party in the 1850s. “His desire is harmless,” Bryant wrote, “and I think should be gratifi ed if he makes out his case.”102 Evidently Gay remained unconvinced by the argument, however, because Cheney’s role in the founding of the Republican Party was not mentioned in Bryant’s Popular History.103 Gay seems to have drawn the line at such efforts to lace the collaborative history with personal tributes to friends, even when his own relationship with Bryant might suffer in the process. Despite Bryant’s occasional intrusions on behalf of friends and acquaintances, his largest contributions to the fi rst two volumes of the history were mainly stylistic. The poet-turned-historian took this role seriously, because for him rhetoric was not merely a cosmetic matter of literary embellishment but an important analytic branch of linguistics concerned with the arts of persuasion, reasoning, and proof. In fact, the correspondence between the coauthors of the Popular History reveals a good deal about the signifi cant role that “rhetoric” played in the nineteenth century despite the fact that it is trivialized today as synonymous with exaggerated or infl ated discourse. Many of Bryant’s editorial notes regarding drafts of the earliest chapters of the work have to do primarily with Gay’s prose style, which predictably Bryant found too restrained at times.104 On the one hand, Bryant was apologetic about his limited role as a mere copy-editor. “I feel . . . almost uncomfortable with the refl ection that I can do little more than supervise the semi-colons and commas and such like,” he wrote Gay.105 On the other hand, Bryant was thorough in the work of proof- reading, making a special point of identifying what he called the “verbal blemishes” in Gay’s writing and suggesting how such imperfections refl ected on the explanatory persuasiveness of his argument.106 Often he proposed to make just “one or two amendments of phrase” to a chapter, only to submit nearly ten single-spaced pages of notes. In particular, Bryant disliked slang and colloquial words like “pluck” and “cheery,” which he derided as the “favorite Cockney terms” of his coauthor.107 He rejected Gay’s use of “newspaper phrases” as well, like “such a fi x,” or his reliance on “burlesque” words like “cantanker- ous.”108 He warned Gay: “It does not become an historian, in translating sober history, to use slang words.”109

98 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9898 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM Bryant also complained of Gay’s tendency to assume too scholarly a profi le, taking issue with his use of Latinisms, which he thought should “either be given in English or explained in a note” for the benefi t of readers of a “popular history.”110 Most important, Bryant argued that Gay’s habit of citing authorities in the manner of scholarly volumes would affect the narrative fl ow of their Popular History. In January 1876, Bryant wrote his coauthor: “I send you back the tenth chapter of the History. You say nothing about its authorship, but it seems to me that it is from another hand than yours,” being overfi lled as it was with quotes from the “old chroniclers” in lieu of original prose. “Judiciously interspersed,” Bryant argued, such quotations “give a certain dramatic effect to the narrative, but I question whether in this chapter they are not too liberally employed. . . . Too many quotations of this kind give a patchwork air to history.”111 Frustrated by Gay’s scholarly habit of “sifting” through “evidence and balancing probabilities” before making historical judgments, Bryant complained that his coauthor’s style “has not the power of fi ring the attention that a narrative has when told by one who had no doubts to solve as he proceeds.”112 Gay accepted most of Bryant’s criticisms with good humor, although those concerning his scholarly detachment rankled him a bit. “Let me say,” he wrote his senior colleague, “that I am as far as you can be from approving of writing history by allusions & my purpose is always to have every thing I say perfectly plain to the reader—never for rhetorical effect to refer to something in a way that may seem erudite or brilliant but conveys no distinct ideas to the reader.” His style was less narrative and sentimental than Bryant would have liked, Gay recognized, but his primary goal was to refl ect consciously on “how to recover social life from the past” without excluding the more mundane political and institutional history of the country—to search for “some glimpse of the life of the men and women who were unconsciously building up an empire through the uneventful detail of their daily duties and pleasures.” Gay also urged his coauthor not to lose sight of the proverbial forest for the trees. “You have read the chapters critically, as [so] much proof rather than as a continuous literary work,” Gay reminded Bryant, adding that a more unifi ed reading of the entire project would confi rm the wisdom of his stylistic choices. “I only want you to believe that I do not work carelessly,” Gay added. “I suppose the sense I mean to convey does not strike you because you are reading to detect errors & imperfections, & not, as other people will, because they are interested in the story, & see the effect of perspective & lights & shadows in the picture.” Acknowledging the hierarchy of duties established by Scribner’s Sons with reference to the production of Bryant’s Popular History, Gay concluded nonetheless that his own authorial voice must be the one to prevail ultimately. “If you read in this way, I should lose the benefi t of your criticisms, but while I William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 99

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 9999 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM have that I want you to believe that a word may sometimes have a signifi cance in my use of it which I hope & believe the reader will see who reads—so to speak—between the lines.”113 Despite the sometimes strained relationship between Bryant and Gay as suggested by these conversations about style, the two generally came to agree- ments on how such matters should be resolved in the text. The collaborative arrangements worked out by the coauthors suggest how conspicuously su- tured Bryant’s Popular History was, revealing the stitches of negotiation and compromise. Bryant rewrote signifi cant sections of the early volumes when he found them unsatisfactory from a literary point of view, and Gay generally adopted such suggestions with only minor complaints. The poet justifi ed his nit-picking by reminding Gay somewhat egotistically that the vaunted Bryant name would appear on the title page, explaining that “the passages in which the words occur may be quoted against me, and I shall hardly know how to defend myself” if they are inadequate.114 Gay understood the pecking order, generally deferring to Bryant’s reputation as a luminary and treating his coauthor with the respect due an unoffi cial poet laureate while refusing to ignore his own important role as lead writer. “I never forget for a moment that I owe it to you that I have the opportunity of writing this book, while you are responsible, at least, for an implied approval of it,” Gay noted.115 The submission of drafts back and forth meant that the project took longer to complete than the publishers at Scribner’s Sons would have liked, but the end product, both authors felt, would justify the process. There was good reason to be optimistic. “We have seen some specimen sheets,” wrote one manuscript reviewer, “and they are suffi cient to show that the book will be produced in a manner which will be worthy of the distinguished editor and the publishers.” The details of American history “will be narrated in a style so readable and popular that old and young alike will be charmed,” the reviewer promised.116

A Work “Made to Sell”

Bryant’s Popular History of the United States was sold by subscription in fi fty “parts” at fi fty cents each, with no order received except for the entire work. Four large royal octavo volumes were projected of nearly seven hundred pages each, the fi rst appearing in 1876 with three others to “follow as rapidly as the magnitude and importance of the work will permit” at a total price of twenty-fi ve dollars.117 That cost was greater than John Frost’s Popular His- tory by some measure, but initial subscribers remarked on the value of the “elegant” illustrations and the excellent book design. “The book will be one

100 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 100100 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM of those expenses which we rank among the necessities of life,” Chas. Cushing of Cleveland, Ohio remarked, “such books—as has been said—being the only paper currency, that is worth more than specie.”118 Readers seemed anxious to sign on. “There can be no doubt that such a book as this is much needed,” wrote one expectant reader, adding: “There are many histories of our country in existence—some good, some tolerable, some very bad; but we cannot remember any one of them which deserves to be called a ‘popular’ history.”119 Early sales numbers indicated that the project would be a likely success with over $53,000 in subscriptions received in the fi rst months of canvassing by book agents.120 Charles Scribner was encouraged. Reviewers of proof pages of volume one of the manuscript indicated that “the work gives promise of becoming the classic history of the Country, as it will unquestionably at once become the standard.”121 Just as the fi rst volume began to sell, however, disaster struck. On June 12, 1878, William Cullen Bryant died at the age of eighty-three. The public outpouring of love and respect for the venerated writer was extraordinary, as Americans from all walks of life paid tribute to him in eulogies, memorials, and public recitations of his poetry. Work on the Scribner popular history naturally stopped for a brief period after Bryant’s death, although the disposition of the manuscript was never far from the minds of either Gay or Scribner. Many subscribers who had received volume one and partial sections of volume two by the summer of 1878 assumed that the project would be laid to rest with its primary author. In the weeks and months after Bryant’s death, the business manager for Scribner’s Sons received numerous inquiries from disappointed readers of the history, some of whom canceled their orders for future installments while others demanded their money back on the presumption that the work would never be completed. Operating under the false assumption that Bryant had been doing the majority of the writing for the history, these subscribers were among the many fooled by a “merchandising device” that now backfi red on Scribner. Since the inception of the project, the publisher had advertised the work as Bryant’s Popular History, obscuring the fact that the volumes were being ghostwritten largely by Gay. As early as 1875 the literary journal Owl protested against “using Mr. Bryant’s name to give [the Popular History of the United States] a reputation and help its sale” when “somebody else” was obviously writing the volumes.122 While Bryant was alive, Scribner had countered the “protest against this method of putting books upon the market” by issuing the aforementioned statement from the poet/historian reas- suring readers that he was taking an active part in the writing of the history.123 With the poet’s death, however, Scribner was forced to admit the hyperbole of his advertising in order to retain subscribers to the series, acknowledging

William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 101

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 101101 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM publicly that Gay’s heavy involvement in the writing of the fi rst volumes meant that there would be little drop off in the quality of the later volumes, despite Bryant’s death. This reversal not only called into question the motivations of the publishers in bringing forth a popular history, it also affected profoundly Gay’s relationship to Scribner’s Sons, which he sought increasingly to bend to his own realist and scholarly will.124 Despite the loss of its titular author, the publishing house had no intention of abandoning the project. No one at the company thought it inappropriate to capitalize on the deceased poet’s name and reputation; indeed, the feeling was that the series should be seen through to completion while Bryant’s stock remained high. The publisher’s plan was to allow Gay to proceed with the unfi nished portion of the work, roughly the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while continuing to advertise the volumes as Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. In point of fact, this represented little departure from the operating procedure to date, since Gay had done most of the researching and drafting of the early chapters. Bryant’s careful editorial comments would be missing, of course, but the business managers at Scribner’s Sons substituted their own copy editors and expressed hope that Gay might be able to work even more expeditiously with these stand-ins who would be far less demanding of change than Bryant. In a note outlining editorial strategies in the wake of Bryant’s death, Scribner urged Gay to complete volume two as rapidly as possible in order to convince readers “that all rumors about the stoppage of the work have been totally false; a fact it has been diffi cult to convince everyone of heretofore.”125 Bryant’s death, however, represented one of those unforeseen moments in the production history of a book that altered irrecoverably the fi nal product. For Gay had no inclination or desire to step up the pace of his writing in order to satisfy the demands of the popular book market. Even before Bryant’s death, Gay had resented the speed at which he was expected to work by Scribner’s Sons in order to meet deadlines. “Mr. Armstrong told me the last time I was in town . . . that some complaints had been made to you of the delay in the appearance of the vol. [II],” Gay had written Bryant in 1877. “I suppose this is inevitable; everybody who reads Vol. I of any book wants Vol. II the next week. But I am writing history—not making merchandise—not even making a book in the market sense.” This conscious rejection of the commercial impulses behind the enterprise suggested the degree to which Gay differed from his publisher regarding profi t motives and popular history. The major blame for delays, Gay added defensively, rested with the “mistaken management” of Scribner’s Sons who had misrepresented the scope of the project. “My understanding with Seymour at the outset was that it would be impossible to bring 102 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 102102 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM out a volume within the time set if it exceeded 400 to 450 pages, the page to be about 420 words. But one morning he said to me—as if we were making cloth by the yard—we will make the page about 500 words and the volume about 600 to 650 pages, & get it out next month! The truth is the volume is at least one third,—nearly one half—longer than fi rst contemplated, & it makes the labor enormous. . . . Pardon me for saying anything on these matters,” Gay had written apologetically to his coauthor when he was alive, “but I can’t bear you should think I am dilatory, when, in fact, I am working very hard. Moreover, we don’t want a work ‘made to sell,’ which, if so made, won’t sell at all.”126 These complaints intensifi ed rather than decreased after Bryant’s death. Gay argued that the more contemporary events were, the more research was required of him to provide a balanced account of their historical signifi cance. He resented the “great hurry” of the publishers at Scribner’s and elsewhere, who seemed to have no appreciation for the complexities of historical writing. “It is dreadful to be so pressed for time, for I feel all the while that if I had more time I could bring out the essential character of all this early history much better than I can pretend to do under such pressure, & make others see that my view is entirely impartial,” Gay wrote. Refusing to compromise his standards, he justifi ed his frequent delays to his publisher with reference to the fastidious- ness of his work as a historian: “Nobody knows so well as I do how hurried & imperfect it all is, but it is at least a conscientious work.”127 The response from Scribner was to hire additional authors to complete individual sections of the project on topics Gay felt less qualifi ed to deliver. In keeping with the strong literary strain of popular histories in this period, these were authors with established reputations as writers, such as Edward Everett Hale, who were hired to restore some of Bryant’s literary sensibility to the enterprise. But Gay found it hard to work with such “help,” and he spent more time critiquing and sav- aging the chapters of his “assistants” than in the writing of his own.128 This inability to work with others in turn provoked the wrath of Charles Scribner, who had publication deadlines to satisfy. Eventually he insisted that Gay give up some of his responsibilities for the volumes so that the copy editors could do their work. “As it seems impossible for Mr. Burlingame and Mr. Marvin to accommodate themselves to your ways, of late,” the publisher noted, “why will you not consent to put it all in Mr. Johnson’s hands! It will be a great relief to you and to us too—as we shall be able to make more rapid progress.”129 Despite the extra help and stern admonishments from his publisher, Gay’s writing slowed to a trickle throughout 1879 and the early months of 1880. Still drawing $400 a month as an advance against royalties, Gay was producing less than twenty-fi ve pages every fi ve weeks, a rate that Charles Scribner complained would soon bankrupt the project. The pace “presents a very ominous William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 103

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 103103 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2812:58:28 PMPM appearance,” Scribner wrote Gay, and “is certainly anything but encouraging.” In addition, Scribner accused Gay of avoiding him, refusing to answer his frequent letters or to respond to his messengers. “You give me no satisfactory assurance, seldom answer questions contained in my letters, and I don’t think you are doing all that you expected to do,” the publisher protested to his author. Scribner added: “Of course, I am anxious to know from time to time what advance is being made on the work and, also, how you are coming out in the matter of space. Is it not proper that some information be given?”130 The tone of the publisher’s complaints intensifi ed still more over the next few months: “The expense is becoming such a burden that I cannot refrain from calling your attention to it,” the publisher wrote Gay. “The price which we are paying for a page of the Hist. is something enormous. . . . No book under heaven could stand such payments.”131 Unrepentant, Gay argued that he would not rush through any part of the work. “The writing of history is one of the things that is not necessarily well done, because it is done quickly,” he argued. “Rather the converse of that proposition is true, and our readers should thank us that we have not been tempted into haste.” Admitting that some apologies might be due readers for the popular history’s “many shortcomings,” Gay insisted that “an apology for delay” or “undue haste” would not be “one of them.”132 By the summer of 1880, it was clear to Charles Scribner that Gay was committed to writing something other than a “popular” history, and the publisher openly objected to the kidnapping of the project. The only leverage the publishers had in rectifying the situation was fi nancial, so Scribner threatened to renegotiate Gay’s contract in light of the slower pace of the writing. “It seems to me that in view of the work on the History being prolonged so far beyond the time contemplated some new arrangement should be made between us. You can easily understand that the payment of so large an amount each month is a matter of serious importance,” he wrote his author.133 The publisher proposed reducing Gay’s advances to $300 a month beginning in April of 1880, to which Gay responded with a sense of bitterness and betrayal, demanding the current $400 stipend and threatening legal action if the entire sum was not remanded.134 The publisher sent the full $400 in April, but he wrote back testily with an additional warning: “I have been surprised at the manner in which you received my announcement that it w’d be necessary to lessen the am’t of monthly advances to you. If you would stop to calculate you w’d fi nd that for less than half the 4th volume of the History I have paid out for authorship alone, between $7000 & $8000. It is unreasonable to expect me to continue at such a rate. I cannot do it.” Scribner determined that he could pay $400 a month only if Gay could guarantee to produce one hundred pages of typescript during that period. If not, then he would insist on the reduction, 104 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 104104 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM even if it meant losing Gay as author. “Unless this is done I shall be obliged to lessen the advance as I have written, and much as I should regret your giving up the work, I should prefer it to such a waste of money as has occurred under the present system.”135 Eventually the advances were reduced to $300 a month, although Gay warned that there would be consequences to the hurried pace that such a reduction would require.136 Among the consequences Gay had in mind was a less balanced (because less thoroughly researched and edited) history. From the beginning of the project, Gay had worked hard to control the “mawkish sentimentality” associated with much of Bryant’s historical vision, but the more studied approach he hoped to substitute in its place collided with Charles Scribner’s ambitious publication schedule. The result was that Gay’s preferred brand of realism gave way to informed opinion, the rejection of melodramatic excess leading not so much to objectivity as to polemic. Gay had always had his “causes,” of course, but as a concession to Bryant’s alternative visions and in the interest of presenting a unifi ed and unbiased front, he had suppressed the impulse to speak his mind in the pages of the popular history. After Bryant’s death, however, Gay came to believe (as the title of a recent book suggests) that “objectivity is not neutrality,” and he adopted a much more political tone in his writings.137 He knew from his work in the editorial offi ces of the New York Evening Post that many of his opinions were not shared universally by Americans, and he understood that an aggressive posturing on certain matters might doom an author to obscurity. Willing to risk unpopularity in the popular book market, Gay now challenged the agreeable tone established by Bryant in the earlier volumes. The last two volumes of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States are certainly very different in temper and method from the fi rst two, and the incon- gruities between Bryant’s preface and Gay’s text are most evident in these latter books. In volumes three and four of the work, for instance, Gay disparaged Americans for “being aroused to an irresponsible enthusiasm on the most facti- tious pretexts” when writing about the founding fathers, in the process “raising the most ordinary mortals to immortality with shouts so frantic that they come at length to be believed sincere.” By inference, then, Gay rejected the blatant hagiography implicit in the preface to Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. In its place, however, Gay offered an equally partisan and less heroic depiction of politics in America, reversing the political tone of the popular history in jarring ways. Jefferson was now “conceited”; Madison’s policies were an “absolute and unmitigated disgrace”; and Jackson was “neither a wise nor a good man, and in many respects he was both a foolish and a bad one.” The strong points in Jackson’s character “were precisely those engendered and developed in the mastership of a gang of negro slaves, and the education of the William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 105

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 105105 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM plantation,” Gay added, and the “slaveholders saw in him a magnifi ed refl ection of themselves” which “they admired and esteemed” accordingly. That Jackson was popular even in the North was attributable to the fact that “there has been always a singular severity in the character of a portion of the American people. In that class the slaveholder has always found his Northern servitor.”138 These departures from the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition extolled by Bryant in his preface refl ected an alternative politics that Gay had suppressed in the fi rst two volumes of the series but which now spilled onto the written page with full force. The opening surge in this tidal wave of partisanship derived from Gay’s frustration with the Democratic Party’s toleration of slavery as an institution in the prewar era. Chapters in the third and fourth volumes of the history were fi lled with prose attacks on the “pernicious system” of slavery, which Gay condemned as the “curse of every colony where it gained a permanent foothold” and the responsibility of every political party that refused to acknowledge “the fatal mistake of a reliance upon slave-labor.”139 While Bry- ant was an outspoken critic of slavery and broke from the Democratic Party on the issue in the 1850s, he muted his complaints in the popular history as a concession to southern readers. In the preface to the fi rst volume, for instance, the poet avoided purposely several opportunities to use fanaticism in the service of melodramatic intent, advocating instead for a more moderate position by noting that the actions of abolitionists and slaveowners “can now, as they and their acts pass in review before the historian, be judged with a degree of calmness belonging to a new era of our political existence.”140 The prospectus, after all, had declared that the popular history “shall be entirely free from any sectional bias.”141 Gay, however, persisted in a form of Dixie-bashing that made Bryant’s Popular History distinctly unpopular in parts of the South. While Northerners demonstrated “quick intelligence and active habits” and made “good soldier[s],” Gay noted in the popular history, the “social condition of the South, on the other hand, produced men whose lack of education, and whose smaller intelligence, required long and severe training” and whose political leaders were “overbearing in manners from the constant practice of petty tyranny over their helpless slaves.” During the slavery debates of the nineteenth century, Northerners had made “an earnest appeal to reason, to patriotism, to humanity, and to fundamental law,” Gay argued, while those in the South had maintained “a stern, unbroken front, impassioned, overbearing, defi ant, and threatening.” In the South, he concluded condescendingly, “cotton was king and kings are not necessarily held to reason.”142 Whereas Bryant had trumpeted the valiant although failed efforts of Amer- ica’s leading politicians (northern and southern) to withstand the pressures of armed confl ict, Gay placed the blame for the Civil War squarely at the clay

106 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 106106 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM feet of pro-slavery leaders. Former president of the United States John Tyler, for instance, was described by Gay as “a bigot” and “a person with whom self-conceit led to arrogance, while it blinded him to considerations of a large, national policy, even if he were capable of grasping one.” Northern politicians who acquiesced to the imperatives of slavery shared equal blame for the war. The “clumsy pretense” that slavery was a Southern problem was but a “soothing fi gment,” Gay wrote, that “lulled the sluggish Northern conscience and befogged Northern intelligence.” Leaders such as Daniel Webster, who abandoned the abolitionist cause in an effort to secure southern approval for a presidential run, encouraged “a people of a higher strain of blood, with centuries of gentle breeding, and a high degree of moral and intellectual cultivation behind them” to be controlled by “an ill-bred, uneducated, and brutal handful of slaveholders.” Franklin Pierce vacillated pathetically on the issue of slavery, “so weak and so destitute of a political conscience that he was a mere tool in the hands of the stronger men about him.”143 The intense tone of Gay’s attack on slavery represented a distinct departure from the more cautious approach of the earlier volumes. On the one hand, it is not surprising that Gay became more impassioned on the contentious topic of slavery after he assumed sole authority for the completion of the project. As a journalist working for an abolitionist paper in New York in the 1850s, Gay had made his printing offi ces a stop on the Underground Railroad, and his diaries from those years are fi lled with descriptions of fugitives who came and went and the monies he expended on them.144 On the other hand, it was the vitriolic fervor of Gay’s enthusiasm for the cause that was so startling, particularly when contrasted with the sober tone of the rest of his writing. Abolition- ists were the only real political heroes in Gay’s later narrative, and he made them the forebears of an emerging American personality that would have been unrecognizable even to the sympathetic Bryant. “[W]hen contemporaneous passions and prejudices shall have passed away,” Gay wrote, the abolitionist movement “will be recognized as the beginning and largely the source of a new era in American history” and “the germ of one of those revolutions that overturn dynasties, save nations, and insure continued progress in human affairs.” Abolitionists like John Brown, who emerged as saint-like martyrs in Gay’s description, were signifi cant not only because they challenged slavery in the South but because they confronted those politicians in the North who “stood in the presence of this monstrous wrong with profound indifference to its existence, or in criminal apathy at their own moral and political responsibility.” Whereas Bryant was willing to admit that abolitionists were “fearless and ready for the martyrdom which they sometimes suffered” in their own day, Gay was inclined to attribute to them a longer-lasting and more signifi cant William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 107

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 107107 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM legacy. “When a generation or two more have passed away,” Gay noted in contradiction to his coauthor, “it will be easier to see and to understand how the scattered seed of a new faith yielded a thousand-fold of fruitfulness.”145 The coming of the war was an intensely personal experience for Gay as well, and he could not resist settling in the pages of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States some personal vendettas he had incurred during its course, even if that made him unpopular with readers. In volume four, for instance, Gay assailed his former boss, Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune, for failing to have come out more strongly against slavery and in support of the war effort in the 1850s and 1860s. Ridiculing Greeley for a “conspicuous want of manliness,” Gay condemned his employer’s pacifi sm as having given “Southerners hope that the North was not resolved to fi ght.” He also criticized as treasonous Greeley’s frequent use of anti-Lincoln cartoons and unpatriotic articles during the war.146 It was Greeley’s reaction to the death of Lincoln, however, that animated Gay most. On the day after Lincoln’s assassination, Gay had gone to the offi ces of the Tribune to oversee the publication of a special edition of the newspaper devoted to the slain president. In its editorial section, Gay was horrifi ed to fi nd an ill-timed piece by Greeley criticizing Lincoln’s policies and impugning his character. Gay suppressed the article, and incurred the wrath of Greeley the next day, when the latter stormed into the Tribune offi ces demanding to know who had censored his article. “I did,” Gay responded, and “I have confi dence enough in the people of New York to be sure that had the article been printed, by this time, there would not be two stones of this building standing.”147 The fact that Gay saw fi t to recount the episode in the pages of Bryant’s Popular History seems startling enough—an airing of dirty laundry, as it were— but given that Greeley had been a candidate for the presidency as recently as 1872, the account was even more striking in its political impertience. Such strong sentiments directed at persons as respected as Horace Greeley worried those at Scribner’s Sons who had taken on Gay as a partner in the Popular History to stabilize rather than politicize the publication. In order to offset the growing expenses of the volumes and to fulfi ll the imperatives of a “popular” work for the widest possible circulation, the history needed to be acceptable to readers in every section of the country, and Charles Scrib- ner knew well the irreparable damage that could be done to the reputation of any historical work deemed too partisan by its readers. Blaming the war unequivocally on the “extreme men of the South” who “knew what they wanted, had determined upon the way by which they meant to get it, and turned with undisguised contempt from all offers of compromise,” Gay refused to accept any part of the counterargument that “it was the North that was arraigned as criminal; the North that must repent of her evil ways; the North that must 108 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 108108 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM clothe herself in a sackcloth, and sprinkle ashes upon her head.” As expedient as such a nonpartisan perspective might have been for wider sales of Bryant’s Popular History, Gay rejected the temptation to compromise his positions for the sake of commercial benefi t.148 If the highly personalized and partisan style of Gay’s treatment of abolitionism and the Civil War concerned those at Scribner’s Sons, his commitments to other “causes” antagonized his editors further. Gay was a devoted worker in the temperance movement, for instance, and he used the pages of the Popular History to rail against the evils of alcohol.149 Rum was responsible for the “gradual deterioration” of Indian tribes, Gay argued, since it “exas- perated courage to ferocity, and embittered every practice of savage warfare. Rum never made the Indian good-natured. He became something appalling, a concentration of the cruel and mocking rage of many men, as soon as liquor fi lled his veins.” Gay also had distinct opinions about immigration and “alien races,” which he interjected into the text of the Popular History at calculated moments in the narrative. He reminisced about British colonial New York in the eighteenth century, for instance, when there “was then no large city, no dangerous class was hidden away in dark cellars and obscure attics, to swarm in unexpected numbers, ready for bloodshed and plunder at the fi rst sign of temporary anarchy.”150 In espousing these special “causes,” Gay satisfi ed an urge to put his own personal stamp on Bryant’s Popular History denied by the publisher, although in the process he may have violated his own rules about the intrusion of authorial voices in historical narratives. Apart from the inconsistencies of style that these outbursts occasioned, they also limited the opportunities Gay had to address issues identifi ed by Bryant as central to the story of American history. In the prospectus for the series, for instance, the publishers had noted that Bryant’s Popular History of the United States “differs from and is superior to any History of the United States now published” in that “it will be COMPLETE,” and “will carry the record through the fi rst century of the independence of the Republic, and to the year 1876.”151 In the preface to the fi rst volume of the popular history, Bryant also declared that “the historian of our Republic would perform his offi ce but in part who should stop short of the cycle of a hundred years from the birth of our nation” or who would ignore the “consequences” of the Civil War, including the rise of violence, fraud and political corruption of the Gilded Age as well as the insidious effects of paper money and protective tariffs.152 But ignore these consequences in the later volumes Gay did, choosing to conclude the fourth and last of the series in this abrupt manner: “With the administration of Andrew Johnson came the beginning of the reconstruction of the Union,—a work badly begun, unwisely carried on, and, at the end of fi fteen years, still unfi nished. For that William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 109

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 109109 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM fi fteen years the war may be said to have been continued on a peace basis, but drawing, year by year, to its inevitable conclusion, as the generation of the last slaveholders and their Northern adherents gradually disappears.”153 This was hardly the detailed assessment of the consequences of war or the currency debate or the tariff issue that large-minded Bryant had envisioned when he circulated the prospectus for the history that bore his name. According to Scribner, this truncating of the original scope of the project was necessitated by a misappropriation of space by Gay in the early volumes of the series. At points throughout the writing of the fi nal volumes, the editors at Scribner’s were forced to remind Gay that a history sold in parts could not ex- ceed the page limits originally contracted for by subscribers without legal consequences. Late in 1880, the publisher wrote Gay to alert him to the fact that only several hundred pages of allotted space remained for telling the lengthy story that Bryant had promised in his prospectus. “I don’t wish to interfere with what you may consider the proper allotment of space to the different divisions of the History,” Charles Scribner wrote, “but, as this is the last chance, I want to be sure that you see clearly the situation.”154 And the situation was dire in the publisher’s estimation. Because of a too-detailed consideration of the colonial era that occupied more than half of the series, the last volume needed to cover the entire period from 1780–1876, arguably the decades of greatest interest to readers of a popular history of the United States. Gay discovered too late that he had “less space” to devote “to the latter half of this century than its importance now calls for.” Scribner might have addressed the problem by adding a fi fth volume to the four-volume series, as Gay would have preferred, but the fi nancial obligations of subscription publishing as well as the frustrations of continuing to work with a recalcitrant author made that impossible. Scribner was forced instead to issue an embarrassing apology to readers at the completion of the series acknowledging that “material ungathered or uncodi- fi ed at the time when Mr. Gay ended his work” made it impossible “to give to that passage of the great narrative a scale equal to that of the rest.”155 These discrepancies between the announced intentions and the realized text of Bryant’s Popular History reopened old wounds for Gay regarding authorship of the piece. For his part, Gay wanted it to be clear to readers at the end of the process that although all the volumes still bore Bryant’s name and refl ected many of his priorities, they had been written almost exclusively by Gay himself, who was not to be held accountable, therefore, for failure to meet all the conditions outlined in the preface by Bryant before his death. In a note to the editors of Scribner’s Sons, Gay asked that any lingering confusion in the matter be clarifi ed in a new preface to volume four. He proposed that such a new introduction read as follows: “The present volume is the completion of the work which the 110 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 110110 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM late Mr. Bryant consented should have the sanction of his name. The fi rst two volumes passed the ordeal of his careful perusal,” but “in justice to those who began the reading of the work at the beginning of its publication, it is only proper to say that, save in the absence of his verbal criticism for the last two volumes, there was no change of actual authorship consequent upon his death.”156 Charles Scribner was not in agreement with Gay on the matter, and he instructed his editors not to print the “most unfortunate” note. He justifi ed his decision to Gay by insisting that the publishing house had done more than necessary already to clarify the authorship of the volumes. “Surely enough and more than enough has been said about Mr. Bryant in connection with the book and what is the use of bringing the matter again before the public,” he asked. “The preface in Vol. II, explained his relation to the authorship of the book and everyone knows he has been dead since then and could have written nothing.”157 Gay took issue with his publisher’s assumptions, however, and responded with the furor worthy of a censored Horace Greeley. “Your assumption is that a great deal has been said about the Bryant question, & that there can be no ‘use in bringing the matter again before the public,’ ” Gay responded angrily. “Either you do not know, or you forget that this matter has never been brought before the public at all except on one side,” he alleged. “A great wrong has been done me for half-a-dozen years, which Mr. Bryant never countenanced nor intended, against which I have always earnestly protested; but all this has been in private. It is the wrong that has been made public hushed to the utmost through the machinery of your agency.”158 Gay claimed that the title of the volumes implied that Bryant had written the work, and he insisted that Scribner’s Sons was perpetuating a form of “literary fraud” in failing to credit him fully. “I have sacrifi ced everything but my good name to the work,” Gay argued, and “I wish to save that.” Declaring the rights of readers and of the deceased Bryant, he added: “it is high time in justice to his memory, & to my character, they should know the truth. I have always determined that I would let the thing alone till the work was fi nished. Now I am no longer bound to sit quietly under the great injustice that has been done & which, at the same time as so impassed the sale of the work. Those who know or guess the exact truth will not buy a work which they believe is attempted to be sold on false pretenses, & cannot, therefore, be good for anything; those who don’t know the truth, & believe Mr. Bryant the author of the fi rst two volumes, don’t want the last two because he couldn’t have written them.” Raising the tone of an already animated discussion, Gay asserted: “I shall never again submit quietly to the intimations which have been made in the newspapers in regard to the relations between Mr. Bryant & myself unless this [paragraph] stands as it is.” He added: “I must say frankly that you have no right to order William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 111

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 111111 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:2912:58:29 PMPM it out; & that to use the power would do me a very great wrong.”159 Scribner responded with equal vigor: “I had no intention of ‘robbing you of your good name,’ nor any desire to sell the History ‘under false pretenses.’ My reason for changing was that the public does not think Bryant wrote the History and we do not attempt to make them believe so. The question of the authorship of the work is settled in everyone’s mind but your own. The clause which I wished struck out is unfair to Mr. Bryant and to all connected with the work at the outset. Mr. Bryant did more than ‘permit the sanction of his name’ as you well know. The phrase is misleading and wrong.”160 These exchanges between publisher and author suggested a troubled history for Bryant’s Popular History of the United States and did not bode well for the fi nal sales of a series that had shown so much promise at the outset. Whereas nearly 17,000 copies of volume one had been sold by subscription by 1884, only 10,600 copies of the fourth volume had been contracted, a 38 percent drop off.161 The correspondence between Scribner and Gay also reveals how sensitive popular histories were to conditions of the literary marketplace. Attributing the modest sales of volumes three and four to the confusion surrounding its authorship, Gay suggested that a more honest approach might help sell additional volumes: “We have not sold the work under the false statement in regard to Mr. Bryant,” he wrote his publisher; “let us see if a frank & truthful one would help us.”162 Scribner disagreed, however, arguing that a work entitled Gay’s Popular History simply would not have been as marketable, even if it refl ected more accurately than the actual title the authorship of the volumes. Described by relatives and acquaintances as “an eminently modest man and rather retiring,” Gay was uncharacteristically “irritable” in response to this snubbing.163 In sending his fi nal lengthy manuscript chapters of the history to Scribner’s Sons for approval Gay looked forward to closing the book on a noble project that he felt had been derailed by an aggressive, profi t-minded publishing house. The worthy muse of History, he concluded, had been compromised by the monstrous force of commercialism.164 For his part, Scribner welcomed closure, writing to Gay at the end of the protracted and painful enterprise: “I am heartily glad this work is through with and hope you will sometime get over your feeling of injustice and fi nd out that you have been treated generously and considerately.”165

No Picture on the Canvas

Predictably, given its odd production history, reviews of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States were mixed. Some reviewers of the volumes found

112 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 112112 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM much to admire in them. The Magazine of American History remarked on the perfect balancing of sensibilities in the fi rst volume of the series that resulted from the very “promising and satisfactory combination of talent” between Bry- ant and Gay. “The well-known judgment and classic taste of the senior and the scholarly, pains-taking fi delity of the junior,” the reviewer noted, resulted in an “original, careful and exhaustive treatment.” Bryant’s literary style was “admirable in its condensed simplicity and easy grace of narrative,” he added, but it was Gay’s treatment of the historical record “from a scientifi c point of view” that was especially “novel and of extreme interest.” This reviewer also thanked Gay for his honest handling of the “landing of the Puritans, in which some pretty traditions are discredited.”166 A critique of the second volume of the series, also in the Magazine of American History, continued this line of praise. Reminding readers that the Scribner volumes represented “a popular history,” the reviewer argued that as measured by the modest standards of such a genre, the series “certainly conveys a vast amount of carefully digested material in a most readable manner.” For those readers anxious to have a little spice with their carefully digested literary meal, the reviewer added that the “element of romance” had not been omitted from the volumes; it had simply been “subordinated to the truth of history.”167 Readers solicited by the publishers to comment on the volumes applauded their high literary merit, acknowledging especially as one did Bryant’s presence in the early chapters on the Mound Builders, which were “more romantic and interesting than the most attractive novel.”168 Another subscriber noted that the writing of the fi rst volume was of “the purist of English, and an elegance of style which is an honor to our mother tongue.” “Most can afford to deny themselves a good many incidental indulgences in order to secure it,” he concluded.169 Meanwhile, a reviewer for Harper’s Magazine pronounced Gay “an independent thinker” who is “positive in his convictions and in his expression of them.” Gay’s style, “though never eloquent, is simple and clear,” Harper’s noted, “free from colloquialisms and from rhetorical blemishes.”170 The popular history’s “pure and fascinating form,” an impressed reader concluded, made the Popu- lar History of the United States Bryant’s “last great work.”171 Perhaps the most thorough and least objective reviewer was from Scribner’s Monthly, whose parent company published the volumes. In a critique of volume two, the Scribner’s reviewer noted that Bryant’s death had resulted in a loss of “the romantic and picturesque” aspects of the colonial story but added that “what is lost in romance and picturesqueness is well made up in historical accuracy.” Gay’s interest “in the soberer light of authentic history” was an advantage for the series, the reviewer noted, which, in terms of reliability of evidence, “is not surpassed, nor even equaled, by any history of the United States that has yet appeared.”172 William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 113

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 113113 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM Scholars were more divided in their assessments. The most vocal critic of the volumes was an anonymous writer in the British periodical, the American Bibliopolist, whose review was so critical that competitors in the popular history market kidded about its value as an advertising tool for their rival works.173 The reviewer condemned the false claims made on behalf of Scribner’s Sons for Bryant’s Popular History as the “standard work of its class.” The advertisers “adopt a style familiar to the readers of prospectuses of new books and new companies,” the reviewer argued, making broad assertions and “exaggerated statements” for the work. In the fi rst place, the American Bibliopolist noted, Bryant was not the editor of the New York Evening Post for fi fty years as the publishers announced; for the last several decades he had been only the “titular occupant of the post, while others have performed its entire duties.” The reviewer complained as well about having been deceived regarding Bryant’s authorship of the volumes and remarked on the lack of credentials on the part of both authors for writing history. Just because Bryant was a literary fi gure of some renown, the reviewer noted, did not mean that the poet was as worthy a historian as the prospectus suggested; and Gay’s experience as a journalist hardly qualifi ed him as an expert on the past. “Mr. Bryant has written some excellent poetry, and has made for himself not only a name, but a large fortune, as journalist and newspaper proprietor, while Mr. Gay may be everything that his friends suppose; yet it seems rather rash to affi rm that the History which they have produced must be a standard work, simply because their names fi gure on the title-page.”174 The reviewer for the American Bibliopolist went on to question the apportioning of work on the project, reaffi rming Gay’s concerns in this editorial matter: “The respective shares of Mr. Bryant and Mr. Gay in the labor of composition are not defi ned,” the reviewer noted. “No doubt Mr. Bryant’s name is attractive on the title-page, but is its place there fully merited? He has written and signed an interesting Preface; has he written anything else? If the actual author be Mr. Gay, then the book ought to be described as the ‘History of the United States, by Mr. Gay, with a Preface by Mr. Bryant’.” The prospectus shed some light on the subject for those readers who dealt with a responsible book agent, but not enough. “We have been informed that Mr. Bryant has revised the proof-sheets, while the real labor has fallen to Mr. Gay. But this ought to have been made clear to the public. We know that Lord Jeffrey revised the proof-sheets of the fi rst volume of Macaulay’s ‘History of England,’ and that he was proud of having done so; but would this have justifi ed an enterprising publisher in entitling the work ‘The History of England, by Lord Jeffrey and T.B. Macaulay?’ The matter is one about which there should be neither mistake nor obscurity.”175 114 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 114114 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM As a scholar residing in England, the reviewer in the American Bibliopolist felt obliged to take issue with some of the historical judgments about Britain made by Bryant and Gay. He wrote: “Though professedly anxious to do justice to all parties, and though he expresses his satisfaction to all controversies between his country and our own have been happily terminated by arbitration, Mr. Bryant does not hesitate to produce a false impression upon the minds of his readers at the expense of this country.” The reviewer condemned “as the reverse of truth” the poet’s thesis stated in the preface that Britain secretly desired the independence of the South during the Civil War. Bryant “forgets, or writes as if he would have his readers think he had forgotten, that Great Britain uniformly and emphatically refused to acknowledge the independence of the South, even though pressed by France to do so,” the reviewer noted. “A writer of Mr. Bryant’s position and character ought not to perpetuate blunders in matters of this kind,” he added, since “[s]tatements like these from his pen tend not only to foster national animosity, but to give an air of truth to a mischievous and utter fi ction.” The reviewer also questioned Gay’s use of historical evidence, quibbling with the employment of controversial and unverifi ed materials related to the voyage of Verrazano. “That voyage is either a fi ction or else is so doubtful as to be unworthy of notice in any other than the most cursory manner; yet Mr. Gay refers to it at length, and treats it as really serious. As a matter of fact, it matters not whether Verrazano made the voyage,” he concluded, “its results were nil upon the history of the world.”176 The American Bibliopolist also questioned the designation “popular” as applied to the Scribner history. “What Mr. Bryant has certainly done he has done well,” the reviewer acknowledged, but the history “signally fails . . . to reply to the question asked in the fi rst sentence as to the need for a new ‘History of the United States’.” Bryant had claimed that the nation required a short, popular history to accommodate those who did not have the “leisure” for reading longer narratives, but the reviewer noted that “a short history is not necessarily a popular one. . . . Nor is a work in many volumes necessarily unpopular.” The use of the epithet “popular” is another of “the mistakes on the title-page,” the reviewer added. He admitted that the literary quality of some of the volumes was good, acknowledging that Bryant “is distinguished above all his countrymen as a writer of genuine and idiomatic English.” While Bryant and Gay had censured out “the rhetoric which disfi gures the pages of Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Motley,” and though “the diction is free from barbarisms to a degree very rare in historical writings by citizens of the United States,” the British reviewer noted patronizingly, “yet the writing is not ‘popular’ in any sense of the term.” Gay’s sparse prose was perhaps most to blame for this loss of literary power. “Many chapters will appear not only dry, but unintelligible to the general reader,” he William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 115

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 115115 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM wrote. “The accounts of the ﬁ rst visitors to the American continent are well worth perusal by those who have studied the subject, but to others they must seem very wearisome.” Bryant’s old age and still older theories may also have been responsible for some of the history’s failings, the reviewer noted. “[N]ot withstanding his great age,” the reviewer wrote somewhat tactlessly and politically, a Bryant “in full possession of his faculties” should have known better than to advocate free trade in the late nineteenth century.”177 Finally, the reviewer for the American Bibliopolist questioned the use Scrib- ner’s had made of illustrations in the volumes. “The frontispiece is a carefully executed portrait of Mr. Bryant,” he noted, but “[w]e confess ourselves unable to understand the reason for placing the poet’s likeness at the beginning of a History of the United States.” The other illustrations in the volumes were “as well executed and even more out of place,” he added. In volume one, for instance, Bryant and Gay had centered their discussion of ancient Mound Build- ers around an illustration of the killing of a mastodon, the authors proclaiming their desire to paint a picture of “pre-historic man on this continent vivid enough to appeal to the dullest imagination, and more remarkable than any similar incident yet found anywhere else.” But the reviewer for the American Bibliopolist wondered why such speculative forays were necessary in a history of the United States. “What human being can be any wiser for gazing upon such an imaginative representation of such an imaginary incident as that of a ‘Pre-historic Mammoth Hunt’?” asked the reviewer. He also had trouble with “Columbus on Shipboard,” which he dubbed one “of these fanciful sketches which teach nothing, and are only interesting when they proceed from the pencil of a great artist as interpretation and product of his mind.” The illustration “Sebastian Cabot Leaving Labrador” was “a steel-plate engraving, which has the drawback of representing what may never have occurred,” he added, and “when Roger Williams is shown in a supposed portrait on one page, and is represented with a totally different face on another, who can proﬁ t by the sight? To write history is a serious matter,” the reviewer concluded, “and to illustrate a history is to undertake a grave responsibility. Despite the assurances of the prospectus, we doubt whether the importance and gravity of the task have been fully apprehended by the publishers, authors, and artists in the present case.”178 Such allusions to the “importance and gravity of the task” of selecting illustrations suggested the seriousness with which many reviewers valued the role of the pictorial element in the production of popular history. Casualness of pictorial treatment was less tolerated than it had been even a decade before, and readers demanded both authenticity of depiction and consistency of words and images in popular texts. These requirements often created tensions 116 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 116116 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM between authors and publishers of such histories as to who should control the illustrations for a pictorial project, and in the case of Gay and Scribner, this strain jeopardized an already frail relationship. In the original contract signed with Scribner’s Sons, Gay was supposed to have responsibility for the selection of illustrators and illustrations.179 Judging from the wide variety of pictorial materials preserved in Gay’s papers at Columbia University, he had some expertise in these areas.180 But delays in producing the written text for the history meant that Gay had even less time to devote to this end of the production, and Scribner expressed frustration with his author’s slow pace as an art editor. “It is certainly possible to select [illustrations] sooner than you do in many cases,” the publisher wrote with exasperation.181 Eventually Scrib- ner delegated the responsibility to several members of his staff, rationalizing the arrangement to Gay by acknowledging the greater expertise in the areas of pictorial design of the substitute consultants. “I should have liked to have had an expression of your opinion as to the illustrations and general appearance of the volume as compared to the ﬁ rst two,” he wrote defensively with reference to volume three. “Your omission to mention either might make me fear that when seen in ﬁ nal shape they did not meet your expectations, were it not that there is such an unanimity of opinion in their favor.”182 Yet there were a number of irregularities, as in the use of a nineteenth-century illustration of Pensacola, Florida (complete with trains and smokestacks) for a discussion of seventeenth-century colonial expansion into the panhandle or as in the depiction of the Ohio River of the 1670s crowded with steamboats. Reviewers of Bryant’s Popular History, at least, did not fail to criticize the volumes for such irregularities of presentation with respect to visual evidence. In addition to these challenges, there was a great discrepancy in the type and quality of the illustrations in the history, an inconsistency that undercut Gay’s claims regarding the compatibility of words and images in the work. Scribner’s Sons had hired at considerable cost many of the best illustrators in the country to elucidate the popular history—including such artists as Al- fred and William Waud, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Edwin A. Abbey, Alfred Fredericks, George Boughton, Mary Hallock, and Sol Eytinge—“probably the most valuable collection of artists and engravers that has ever been gotten together in this country,” according to one participant.183 The intention was to have Gay correspond with these artists about the subject matter and tone of their illustrations, but production schedules often made that impossible. Gay had been so slow in producing text for the later volumes that many of these illustrators had to work independent of it. As a result, some artists chose highly sentimental modes of pictorializing inappropriate to the general tone of the work. Others produced images out of scale in importance William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 117

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 117117 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM to the text, while still others missed opportunities to depict elements of the narrative most central to Gay’s interpretation.184 In addition, some of the illustrations had been created in advance of any of the text so that they could be circulated by book agents as a means of advertising the volumes. Embarrass- ingly, a number of these images had to be dropped from the published version of the history because their subjects were never addressed as historical topics by Bryant or Gay. As with the confusion over authorship so with the choice of illustrative matter; the constraints of time and concerns over costs resulted in some rather haphazard, inconsistent pictorial decisions. In some cases, Scribner borrowed prior pictorializations from articles in Scribner’s Monthly that bore little or no relationship to the themes in the popular history.185 In other cases, where original works were needed, Charles Scribner commissioned with mixed success artists such as Edwin Austin Abbey whose reputations as “artistes” made their images seem superior to any written text.186 On the one hand, Abbey’s “Trial of Mrs. Hutchinson” suggests the illustrator’s “keen sense of narrative composition” as a defi ant Anne Hutchinson confounds the assembled magistrates who have come to harass her. “A fanatic for historical accuracy, Abbey often spent the bulk of his commission money on props and research materials,” Ken Kempcke has noted; and in this illustration, costumes are meticulously researched and presented, along with furniture and even book bindings.187 Dramatic without being sensational, the illustration prompted Henry James to assert that Abbey’s depictions were “direct” and “immediate” and were “without tricks or affectations of any sort of cheap subterfuge.”188 The reviewer for the North American Review agreed, declaring that such pictorial illustrations were “all that the public can desire,” and noting that the volumes of Bryant’s Popular History were far superior to “such popular publications” as those of the “late Mr. S. G. Goodrich,” for whom the term “popular” meant “a merely superfi cial work.”189 On the other hand, revealingly, the “Trial of Mrs. Hutchinson” is incompatible with Gay’s text, which describes Hutchinson as wild and intemperate. “It is probable that the agitations of the years had affected her temper and somewhat impaired her judgment,” Gay wrote in obvious contradiction to the illustration. Evidently Gay’s defense of the Puritans in their dealings with dissidents like Anne Hutchinson was too unorthodox for Abbey to have anticipated or appreciated, and the unfl attering depiction of the chief magistrates in the illustration indicates that he was following conventional wisdom when he sketched the work. Still more, this illustration appeared in the text one hundred pages after the description of Mrs. Hutchinson’s murder by Indians on the frontier, suggesting that word and image were not carefully integrated in 118 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 118118 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM the editorial process. A similar incongruity was evident in Abbey’s illustration of the “Landing of John Alden and Mary Chilton” at Plymouth Rock, a mythic disembarkation scene Gay had denounced as impossible in the accompanying text.190 In short, from a pictorial point of view, Scribner’s Sons’ history was a patchwork enterprise and an awkward hybrid at that. “In the manner of gift books,” David Tatham has noted, “the Popular History sported illustrations by a legion of prestigious artists. The published volumes, however, show little sign of the unifying mind of an art editor. . . . They contain pictorial incongrui- ties of a sort that could still be found in some juveniles and lesser gift books of poetry, but that had been increasingly avoided by major publishers in the 1870s. In a serious work of history, [Scribner’s] seemingly casual approach to illustration provoked criticism, and rightly so.”191 Gay was angered as well by the usurping of his duties as selector of illustrations, and he felt such inconsistencies refl ected poorly on the volumes and on his name. He had resisted for many months the attempt by Scribner’s Sons to bring other art consultants onto the project, and he did not want to be pushed in the matter of choosing images to illustrate the text until his narrative was complete. Conversely, Scribner resented all along paying Gay as an art editor when there were illustrations to be supplied about which he “seem[ed] to care little or nothing.”192 The issue came to a head, fi guratively and literally, when the art editors at Scribner’s included a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Wash- ington as the frontispiece to the third volume of the series, a controversial decision because of a recent national debate over its authenticity. In 1873, Colonal Sherwin McRae had petitioned Congress to acknowledge the famous Houdon “life-mask” of Washington as the “offi cial” representation of the fi rst president, arguing that this realistic image should become the only standardized likeness used in government statuary, portraiture, and advertising.193 Gay agreed.194 Such standardization would help eliminate the confusing array of competing images of Washington and would safeguard against misrepresentations like the sentimentalized Stuart head, which falsely idealized Washington in his estimation. Years earlier, however, Bryant had endorsed in the Evening Post a rival image derived in part from the Stuart likeness.195 Scribner’s decision to publish a Stu- art-derived likeness of Washington raised eyebrows with critics and convinced Gay that, once again, his opinions about visual evidence mattered not at all.196 These criticisms were symptomatic of a larger discipline-wide debate regarding the “scholarly” ambitions of popular historians. When plans were announced in 1874 for a new collaborative and popular history of the United States, the Boston Daily Globe introduced Gay as a “journalist of wide experience and long standing,” whose popular work revealed “[h]ow well journalistic training tells in the writing of fact books, such as travels and history.”197 William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 119

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 119119 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM That same publication remarked two years later, however, that Gay should not be considered one of those objectionable journalists who adapted the term “popular history” as a way of “cover[ing] inferior productions.” Instead, the Globe associated his work with “popular in the best sense of the term,” written “as to be adapted to the comprehension of the people” yet “worthy also [of] the confi dence of scholars.”198 To be sure, Gay shared in common with later professional historians a faith in the “cumulative” nature of historical pursuits. Like Sir Geoffrey Elton, he believed that “writing a defi nitive history of something, so defi nitive that it would never need to be written again, was an ambition that was not only laudable . . . but also eminently achievable.” The stockpiling of knowledge (“fi lling in a gap,” as scholars refer to it today) was a worthy goal “just as important as transforming our understanding of what is already known,” as Bryant had attempted, “if not more so.”199 Gay was doubtless hurt, however, by the opinion of a New York Times reviewer that his scholarship had crowded out narrative to such an extent as to make a “thoughtful reader” wonder “how far this volume carries us in the study of our people at present, and how much it amounts to.” Claiming that the term “popular” was “contradictory” in Gay’s usage, the reviewer concluded: “There is something in the title that arouses a certain misgiving.”200 A reviewer for Harper’s seemed to catch the tone of disappointment that both author and publisher experienced at the end of the writing process. He concluded with the sobering refl ection that “this is not the history of the United States which the country longs for.” Desiring for America the kind of popular historian Hume or Macaulay or Knight provided British readers, this critic developed a painterly metaphor to express why Bryant and Gay had not attained such a status. “The material has been gathered, the characters have been studied, the author has made himself familiar with the incidents,” the reviewer wrote of Gay, “but he possesses no art of generalization and no artistic skill in grouping. The pigments are all well mixed upon the palette, but there is no picture on the canvas. His material embarrasses him; his history will be almost, if not quite, as large as Bancroft’s, which it does not excel in style, and to which it is inferior in sobriety of literary and historical judgment.” Without a proper sense of historical perspective and with little intuitive understanding of what the people wanted from their history, Gay was guilty of painting the backdrop so elaborately as to leave no room or time for narrating its main story. Bryant’s Popular History of the United States was written “as if in a biography one should ransack the memories of parents and nurses for incidents of the hero’s childhood, and abbreviate the story of his manhood’s achievements,” the Harper’s reviewer concluded. He had reduced American history to the level of the naive and juvenile.201 120 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 120120 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3012:58:30 PMPM That no American Hume or Macaulay or Knight existed may have had something to do with the unique features of the popular book market in the United States in the 1870s. For one thing, the amount of history that needed to be covered by historians of the United States continued to increase in the post- Centennial era, and it became harder and harder for a single author to take on an entire popular history alone. Collaborative works such as Bryant and Gay’s became more and more the norm, and that condition increased the likelihood of patchwork histories that betrayed the seams of an uneven editorial process. In addition, popular histories were subject increasingly to greater accountability on behalf of a reading public more attracted to realist forms of literary presentation. Bryant’s tendencies toward the melodramatic required Scribner’s Sons to counterbalance his sentimentality with the more prosaic style of Gay. Without sacrifi cing narrative fl ow, Gay was expected to establish the scholarly authority of this polyglot work, and to do so with enough dispatch to allow Scribner’s Sons to realize some returns from the enormous costs of production associated with the work.202 These many responsibilities proved too much for Gay, trained mainly as a journalist. Eventually publishers of popular histories began looking beyond the ranks of newspapermen for the completion of these diverse tasks. This led to the commissioning of a new breed of professionally trained historians with popular aspirations and established literary skills. A fi nal episode in the fallout from the publication of Bryant’s Popular His- tory suggests the degree to which Gay’s struggles mirrored national trends. Gay was fl attered when he received an invitation from the membership committee to join the American Historical Association at its second annual meeting in 1885.203 In a very real sense, this invitation was his badge of acceptance as a scholar and signaled the completion of his personal odyssey from popularizer to professional. He must have been disappointed, however, when Bryant’s Popular History came under attack within the AHA as an example of the kind of history on which professional historians should not rely. At the second session of the second annual meeting of the AHA, a paper on “The Purchase of the Louisiana Territory and its Effects upon the American System” was read on behalf of the Reverend C. F. Robertson, who could not attend. In the paper, Robertson al- luded to the treasonous role Alexander Hamilton had played in a “scheme on the lower Mississippi, which was imputed to Aaron Burr” and inferred that the duel between Burr and Hamilton which ended the latter’s life was somehow related to a disagreement over this scheme.204 The thesis raised the ire of at least one audience member, Rufus King, who attributed this fallacious interpretation to the fourth volume of Bryant’s Popular History, in which Gay argued that Hamilton had been in correspondence with James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory, about depositing arms in Cincinnati in anticipation William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 121

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 121121 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM of an overthrow of the United States government.205 Warning against reliance on popularizers like Bryant and Gay, King noted that he had made a thorough scholarly investigation of the charge and reported that “at Cincinnati the oldest inhabitants had never heard of the ‘men and boats’ which are alleged to have been gathered there.” Having been assured by John C. Hamilton, grandson of the fi rst secretary of the treasury, that “there is no such ‘unpublished correspondence’ between Hamilton and Wilkinson as intimated,” King concluded that “there is no authority for such a charge.”206 Robertson was not at the meeting to defend himself, nor is there any record of Gay responding to the session, but the episode was the occasion for another AHA member in attendance to call publicly for a more “careful and diligent search” of the subject by professional historians with a greater commitment to the facts than popularizers had demonstrated to date.207 In the meantime, Bryant’s Popular History demonstrates the degree to which historical writing in America was in fl ux in the 1880s. Decisions about its structure, style, and length were made with the needs of the authors and the marketplace in mind, and the volumes represented a series of compromises between Bryant, Gay, and Scribner on matters of presentation and argument. As a form of popular history, the work aspired to reach as wide an audience as possible, and that ambition required concessions to general readers that some found destructive to the pursuit of objectivity in history. Despite the doubts of these detractors, however, Bryant’s Popular History satisfi ed many readers who accepted the “constructed” nature of its hybrid text and who proclaimed the virtues of its collaborative style and insights. Their endorsement reminds us of how important popular history continued to be after the Centennial to the formation of a historical consciousness in America. In an age when the concept of an unalterable standard of historical verifi cation had not yet been embraced in full, works such as Bryant’s Popular History competed well with those of scholars in the literary marketplace. Narrative history, with all its literary excesses and failings, was still a functional if not dominant means of historical expression. Put differently, the average American in the 1880s could still learn more about the “popular uses of history in American life” by reviewing the complex editorial disagreements among Bryant, Gay, and Scribner with reference to Bryant’s Popular History of the United States than by consulting the minutes of the American Historical Association meetings.208

122 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 122122 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM The great paradox of modern empiricism is that this philosophy begins with a great show of respect for “fact” as the rock of intellectual salvation. On it we are to escape from the winds of dialectic illusion. But as science critically analyzes the “facts,” more and more of them are seen to be the products of old prejudices or survivals of obsolete metaphysics. —Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature 3...... The

Metahistorian

as Popularizer

John Clark Ridpath

AND the Universal

Laws of Popular

History

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 123123 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM Labor omnia vincit

Sydney Howard Gay’s disagreements with his publisher Charles Scrib- ner and with his coauthor William Cullen Bryant often centered on the issue of authenticity in history and the responsibilities popular historians had to accuracy of historical presentation. Suspicious of rhetorical language and concerned with its potential to seduce readers, Gay preferred to depict the past from the “scientifi c point of view.”1 For their part, Bryant and Scribner chose to characterize history as a literary art and insisted that a scientifi c standard of proof must not compromise the role of the imagination. They were predisposed toward narrativity as a structuring device and toward elements of plot and character as storytelling components. Bryant and Scribner were typical of those who viewed history as a production that required the overarching authorial presence of the historian to give meaning and shape to the amorphous past. Gay took the opposite tack, arguing that the past had a reality all its own and that the historian’s job was to convey the hard facts of history with disinterest, guarding always against the impulse to “degenerate” into an “advocate or, even worse, propagandist.” Gay himself did not always meet his own standard in this regard, but, in embracing the “cult of the fact,” to use Novick’s term, he declared his general “discontent with rhetorical and imaginative presentations of human life.”2 This debate over the proper form of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States raised philosophical questions about what constituted past experience and whether historians were capable of producing narratives that corresponded accurately to that reality. Some epistemological skeptics viewed all historical refl ections as mere reconstructions, dependent totally on the imaginative designs of the historian’s mind and acceptable only on faith. For the most ardent of such skeptics, the past did not exist except as a shadowy and unverifi able derivative of the present moment. Few popular or professional historians of the late nineteenth century were that cynical, however. As Berkhofer has noted, most were willing to admit the “reality” of prior events, and they sought practical ways “to combine intuitive insights with rigorous empiricism, generalizations and abstractions with concrete and specifi c facts, argument and analysis with story-telling, interpretive understanding with logical explanation, creative organization with objective reporting, impartiality and detachment with moral judgment and advocacy.”3 The primary points of contention among practicing historians of the era, therefore, centered on the degree to which certain “facts” should be trusted over others and on whether “historical meaning” inhered in “facts” (however defi ned) or in the universal laws derived from facts. No better example of the relevance of these distinctions can be found than in the life and 124 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 124124 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM work of John Clark Ridpath, who spent his entire career trying to reconcile the objectivity and impartiality of his “scientifi c” studies of the past with the subjectivity and personalized perspective inherent in the narrative forms of his popular literary presentations. Especially signifi cant were Ridpath’s efforts to transcend the dichotomies implicit in objective/subjective dualities through a “metahistorical” approach to the past and his keen insights into what promotional techniques would best help sell such metahistories in the popular marketplace. Ridpath’s background was typical of those popular historians who trained themselves broadly for a variety of potential careers. Born in a log cabin in Put- nam County, Indiana, in 1840, on the edge of the frontier, and among a people whom he described as having fought battles “in a land of woods and hills” “without dismay or fainting,” lifting Indiana “out of savagery,” Ridpath was a precocious student among hardworking but largely uneducated farmers. As a young boy he amazed neighbors with “a great wooden globe” he had fashioned from a section of a walnut tree and on which he had carved a map of the ancient world. “His mind took up the substance of books as if by intuition,” one neighbor remembered, until by “his eleventh year he had accomplished whatever the old log school-house and its presiding geniuses could impart.” Like fellow Hoosier Abraham Lincoln, Ridpath worked on his father’s farm and read vora- ciously whatever books he could fi nd, including natural philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, and the outlines of natural history. “Most of the works thus obtained were merely popular, and were of little use as texts of actual information and human philosophy; but they had their value for a boy,” noted one relative.4 Among other things, these crude volumes determined the parameters of Rid- path’s juvenile literary imagination and helped shape his beliefs about human character, the cause-and-effect relationships of history, and the literary choices associated with good narrative storytelling. They defi ned his youthful experience with respect to the culture of the book as well, and Ridpath remained committed to the simplicity, durability, and affordability of such popular works long after he had been exposed to more refi ned narrative formats. When it became clear that Ridpath’s fascination with the life of the mind superceded his interests in farming, his family encouraged him to abandon agriculture and to enroll in Indiana Asbury University in Greencastle (later DePauw University). He had no preparation in classical languages and was originally advised that it would take him six years to complete his educational program, but because of his supple mind and his conscientious work habits he managed to graduate with his class in only four years. “His attainments in Latin and Greek were regarded in the college as something phenomenal,” wrote one DePauw alumni. “He is said while a student to have read all of the John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 125

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 125125 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM Agricola of Tacitus while riding horseback from his country home to the seat of the University, eight miles distant. On arriving, he asked the professor of Latin for the privilege of reading the whole to him on examination; but the professor excused himself, and gave Ridpath 100 blind!” 2 Ridpath’s motto at Asbury became: Labor omnia vincit, “labor conquers all things,” and he held himself and his fellow classmates to very high standards when it came to class work. Complaining about the “despicable habit” among college students of taking a “student’s Sabbath” from school assignments on Saturdays in order to socialize and indulge in “degenerating, slothful indolence,” Ridpath fraternized only occasionally with classmates, setting aside “a goodly amount of work” for the weekends and toiling well into the night on Saturdays when his “persecu- tors” were “asleep.”6 His intellectual ambitions were enormous, friends noted, and he brought a monastic attitude to bear on academic assignments. Clearly college was more meaningful to Ridpath than it was to most students on the Indiana frontier, although friends and family worried that he was too serious in his academic pursuits. Some of their concerns were well founded, as he was subject to defi nite mood swings. Complaining that there was “no constancy in anything” associated with his life, he recorded in private journals his daily transportations from the “quagmires of despondency” to the “gleams of conviviality.”7 As a distraction from overwork and depression, he liked to refl ect on his personal history. “I love to sit down and think over the past—to glance back into those dreamy realms of soft, pure sunlight—to ramble again in imagination along the little sporting streams whose sunny banks are hallowed by the sacred associations of my childhood,” he wrote sentimentally in his diary.8 He also read popular histories, especially those of Washington Irving, and devoured the works of William Cullen Bryant, whose poem “The Day Dream” he adored. Ridpath admitted to a scandalous fascination with radical literary journals as well, despite what “straight-gowned Doctors of Divinity and wooden-headed moralizers may say” about them.9 Given to long refl ections on the passage of time, Ridpath was a self-proclaimed “romanticist” of the moody midcentury variety, and he aspired to be a bard. The margins of his infl ated journals were littered with overstylized original poems such as the following: Hail to the year! let what there will betide Let it be welcome, for no wilder thought Or deeper power can o’er my pathway glide Than what already the past years have brought: Life is a drama of strange pictures wrought, Mingled and blended in a varied glow,

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 126126 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM All in the end returneth back to nought Save the free spirit, which though tempests fl ow Mocks e’en the idle tomb when all beside lies low. Sometimes depressed for days about his mortality and the fl eeting nature of time, the aspiring poet Ridpath walked the fl oors of his dorm room at night contriving ways to avoid “the throng that moves to join the dead.”10 Lack of money was always a problem for Ridpath in school, and he refl ected melodramatically on the effects poverty was having on his disposition and mind. “I am in perfect destitution of even a suitable amount of raiment wherewith to decorate and adorn my comely person,” he complained; “and I do not deem it that any one possessed of any great amount of sensitiveness can enjoy himself (or herself especially,) under the circumstances herein before stated—that is, as the Latins would say semi-nudus.” When money was advanced by his father to offset expenses, Ridpath was overcome by guilt about using it, especially in frivolous pursuits. “By the way Father was here to-day and gave me enough of the ‘needful’ to keep me going a while. When I think where the funds come from upon which I am fl oating along so easily, I feel like hiding in the darkest corner of the earth; yet I went to the Festival to-night and payed for it too. Oh! consistency, thou art a jewel.” Yet like many nineteenth- century thinkers of a romantic temperament, Ridpath believed that his lack of money might also serve as an inducement to greatness. “I am like the man in ‘the house that Jack built’,” he wrote in a private note, “that is to say ‘all tattered and torn’ but poverty is good for me; it awakens effort, and energizes man’s nature, and warms up the dull listless tide of thought into something like a general fl ow, and if nothing but soft sicky sentiment comes forth as the fruit thereof, that is better than remaining a pillared column of brick and mortar.”11 Even melancholy and the pathos of misery had their benefi ts for Ridpath. Sentimental in posture in most things literary, Ridpath was not as hopelessly disengaged as the stereotype of some nineteenth-century poets would have one believe, however. In fact, he fought constantly against his romantic temperament, because he also had very strong ambitions to make a practical mark in the world. Hence, his college journals include numerous self-warnings against too strong an indulgence in poetic refl ections. At the beginning of his sophomore year, for instance, he wrote with a tone of self-reproach: “And so I fi nd myself at my old tricks,—moralizing in a kind of monotonous strain of misty melancholy which was the chief companion of my earlier days—a something which I know, in these times of dull practicality, must be abandoned, or, all my hopes of accomplishing aught in the world will inevitably go down into an unassuming pile of staves like a sun-dried barrel.”12 Increasingly anxious

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 127127 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM “to be popular,” Ridpath believed that the pathway to success lay not in romantic refl ection but hard-nosed practicality. Balance was the key. Ridpath’s days were occupied by the prosaic tasks of completing the college program, but his nights were given over to contemplating greatness and devising practical schemes for attaining popularity. “How easily some men have become immortal—left a name and a fame to other days; the one becoming more and more glorious as the sun that goes down in triumph; the other widening and deepening like the channel of a river, swelling on forever to the ocean of its search,” he wrote refl ectively one night. “Step by step men mount to the pina- cle [sic] of their greatness, which when once attained gives the bold climber a despot’s sway and dominion overall beneath.”13 As this stately metaphor would suggest, one avenue of potential infl uence contemplated by Ridpath was politics. The Midwest had come into national political prominence in the 1850s and 1860s, and Ridpath hitched his wagon early to the rising Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln. He was active at Asbury in a number of political student organizations and in the debate club, and he gathered around him a small group of like-minded and proactive friends: “We number eight; all Republicans, and all brave and chivalrous even to a fault,” he wrote. They were also unabashed nationalists who shared the patriotism of the Young Americans as well as some of the exclusionary outlook of the Know-Nothing party in the Midwest. “I am considerable of an Ameri- can—am opposed to ‘the insidious wiles of foreign infl uence’,—that is to say, as regards politics, I am strictly orthodox,” he wrote.14 Ridpath’s college journal, however, also refl ected an early and persistent pessimism with politics. Disgusted with the inability of politicians to stave off the impending Civil War, Ridpath wrote in March of 1861: “Abe Lincoln is President. Who cares? not I for one nor for the whole combined jam smash of such earthly humbugs.”15 The sense of discouragement evident here followed Ridpath throughout most of his professional career, and he rejected all but one sincere suggestion from well-meaning neighbors that he enter politics as a form of public service and as a way of satisfying personal ambition. Other career paths held out more hope for an intellectual novice so easily disillusioned with the affairs of State. By the end of his fi rst year in college, Ridpath had growing aspirations to be not just a poet but also a writer based on early successes with pieces he submitted to the local papers in the spirit of “old Billy Shakespeare.” Seduced by seeing his name in print in the Green- castle Daily Gazette, Ridpath confi ded in his journal in 1862: “To-day I . . . feel like an author—just think of it. Will have another piece out on Friday, then be author twice, hurrah! I have to spend my afternoons in other people’s service, if it were not for which I should soon be great—don’t know but what I will 128 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 128128 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3112:58:31 PMPM be any how. Just bring your greatness on; I am here ready and waiting for the last day of Feb.”16 But typical of his mood swings, such optimistic expressions were accompanied by self-indicting refl ections on his breaking of the Sabbath in order to meet literary deadlines. “I am ambitious of distinction, and anxious for success in my literary labors,” he wrote privately, and “these must be pros- ecuted in the few moments which I have to spare from my regular studies [on Sundays]. . . . but I fully intend (and I mean to put my intention into practice immediately) to stop this same forever. I don’t relish the idea of being a hea- then by disobeying the plain injunctions of the holy Law in any such style.”17 Ridpath’s passion for writing, then, had to be harnessed to a more manageable and practical vocation that would not require compromises in his work schedule or his faith. To these ends, Ridpath settled on a career as an educator, a profession for which he was instantly qualifi ed by virtue of his college degree. After graduation from Asbury, Ridpath took a position as a teacher and later principal at a local Greencastle school, and within a few years he was promoted to Super- intendent of Education for his district. He did not last long in that position, however, as he was lured away by an attractive offer to return to his alma mater. Ridpath had delivered the valedictory speech at his graduation titled “The Philosophy of History,” and this disquisition so impressed the dignitaries at Asbury that they conspired to fi nd a way to get him back to campus.18 Within three years of his college graduation, Ridpath returned to Asbury to pursue a master’s degree, and shortly after its completion he became a professor of Eng- lish Literature. Eventually Ridpath was moved to the department of Belles- Lettres and History and later he became chair of a new department in History and Political Philosophy, where he remained for nearly fi fteen years training Asbury undergraduates in the scholarly pursuit of history.19 Although he never earned a Ph.D. from a German university as did many of those scholars who later assumed important academic positions within the profession, he was one of the few professors at any American college or university in the 1880s to hold an appointment in American history.20 It was not until the 1890s that such positions were available at prestigious universities such as Harvard, Johns Hop- kins, and Michigan; prior to that date, history, when it was taught at all, was associated with either Classics or the study of literature.21 In choosing to become a professor, Ridpath abandoned some of his poetic ambitions to be popular in the most conspicuous public arenas. He devoted himself instead to the discipline of history, the “grandest of all departments of human inquiry,” as he defi ned it, and to pedagogy.22 He studied broadly the scholarship of his fi eld, and he took on the rewarding tasks of preparing classes, grading assignments, and tutoring students. Ridpath’s annual reports

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 129129 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM as chair of the history department give some insight into his work as a professor and into the kind of diverse curriculum in history available to undergraduates at a place like Asbury in the 1870s and 1880s. Ridpath taught Composition and Rhetoric to most fi rst-year students and offered a “History of the United States to the close of Mexican War,” which enrolled on average between eighty and ninety students a year. Sophomores could take his three-term sequence in world history centered on Thalheimer’s large (and somewhat ponderous) manuals: fi rst term, “Outlines of Ancient History”; second term, “Outlines of Medieval History”; and the third term, “Outlines of Modern History.”23 Juniors often elected his courses in English Literature, Logic and Rhetoric, and Constitutional Law, the latter proving a great success. “We use Bancroft’s two volume History of the American Constitution as a text book,” Ridpath noted in his annual report of 1878: “The work proved to be of so much interest that as soon as the subject was introduced about 25 members of the Senior Class petitioned for the privilege of taking it up as an elective study.”24 Seniors also took political economy, international law, and the history of civilization using Guizot’s History of Civilization (as far as the Reformation).25 By all accounts, Ridpath was a highly distinguished teacher of undergraduates. Part of his success derived from his thorough and scholarly preparation of material. “He called the roll as if he detested it—a waste of precious time,” remembered one student. “Then with a straightening jerk at his fl owing beard, which led it back to the straight and narrow way of orthodox whiskers, a cruel wrench at the stolid dog’s head which guarded either arm of his chair, he would plunge at a single bound into any epoch or condition from the laws of Ancient Egypt to the laws of modern Embargo.” He overwhelmed students with the breadth of his knowledge. “One group of coeds, impressed with the famous professor’s immense store of knowledge and calculating their own rate of study, decided that it would take ‘just three hundred and eighty-seven years to learn as much as Dr. Ridpath knew in a minute!’ ”26 Another former student added: “Dr. Ridpath was a progressive teacher, one who was a constant student himself, who went to art treasures and fountain heads of knowledge where his great mind grasped and retained subject matter that he was especially endowed to impart to his pupils.”27 Beloved by his students and sensitive to his own humble roots, Ridpath even took in undergraduates who could not afford board in college. Asbury alums had several endearing nicknames for their beloved mentor, including “Old Reddy” and “Old Rusty,” in recognition of his long red beard, fl owing whiskers, and captivating personality.28 Despite his awesome teaching and administrative duties, Ridpath also kept up a rigorous writing schedule. He regarded historical scholarship as the most meaningful way for him to demonstrate to his students the value

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 130130 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM of his pedagogical philosophies. He harped constantly on the relevance of objective facts for the telling of the story of the past. In his introductory survey course, for instance, Ridpath informed students that the term “history” derived from the Greek word historia—meaning story—and that for centuries the record of the past had been little more than the collection of the fanciful narratives of storytellers specializing in mythological tales, “wild visions and broken dreams.” While many of these spurious stories were dramatic and interesting to read, he noted, they were “small, indistinct, obscure, disfi gured with prejudice,” and “streaked in every part with the taints and obliquity of the minds by which it has been produced.” Favoring analytic over descriptive methods, Ridpath distinguished between what he called the “facts and events which constitute the real history” (Gay’s preferred defi nition) and history as “a literary product” (as Bryant imagined it). Behind most popular historical literature, he argued, there is “another and real history of which the book- history is but a passing shadow,” a “reduced dead image of some great fact as much more sublime than the transcribed images of the printed pages as the open heavens with their galaxies and rolling worlds are more sublime than star-maps and orreries.” True history, exciting history, he argued, is the event itself “and not the refl ection of it in some poor labored page done by the grop- ing genius of man.” Scholars compiling historical facts were thus engaged in a dramatic enterprise even if their narrative wings were clipped by its requirements of objectivity. Real history, he concluded, “is a scene so tremendous and vital in all its parts that the most lucid narrative of the stage and the actors is but a passing glimpse, a mere image of frost-work and evanescent shadow” in comparison to it.29 Ridpath’s commitment to objectivity as a scholar was real, but he did not wish to be thought a mere compiler. He was too much a teacher and lecturer to abandon the idea of narrative as a structuring device for disseminating the lessons of the past. What he tried to do was to control the kinds of literary effusions that spilled too easily over into romanticized history. Exercising restraint was not always easy to accomplish, he realized, given the oratorical preferences of his age and the “dictation method” by which he composed his books. His secretary noted that it was Ridpath’s habit to do his work “in the early morning and forenoon,” writing “rapidly and correctly, rarely having to change anything with more than a touch here and there.” On occasion he made use of friends and family, as when he asked his daughter, Mimi, to participate in the daunting task of transcribing the History of the World longhand while he dictated. The secretary he employed toward the end of his career to typewrite his remarks noted that there were two personalities evident in Ridpath the writer: one the sober scholar and the other the unrepentant dreamer. “His refl ective John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 131

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 131131 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM powers have had to struggle for the mastery with a lively and unconquerable fancy,” this secretary wrote insightfully. “His is preeminently a young mind. The habit of the man, though digniﬁ ed on occasion in a high degree, is nevertheless so cheerful and at times so boyish as to range him with the young. He devotes himself with extreme persistency and buoyancy of spirit to the longest and most exacting tasks. On one occasion, while composing the Cyclopaedia of Universal History, he worked for seventeen months, without a loss of a day, and was at the end in no wise fagged.”30 This divided personality was evident in Ridpath’s choice of scholarly projects. In the mid-1870s, the professor of history decided to write A Popular History of the United States for the Centennial book market that would appeal both to students and to general readers. Adopting many of the structural and organizational conventions of Guizot’s popular histories, Ridpath and his publishers, Nelson and Phillips, conceived of his work as a compendium of the great events and personages associated with the growth of America. He hoped it would be a substantial academic contribution to the scholarship on Ameri- can history, but it was also part travelogue, part exhibition catalogue. A major portion of the work was devoted to a description of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia whose fairgrounds Ridpath visited in the summer of 1876. Of- fering his text as a historical guidebook of sorts for those who could not get to the exposition, Ridpath portrayed the fair as a shrine for national self-renewal and as the apotheosis of the ﬁ rst one hundred years of American development. Marketed as a one-volume edition with illustrations, charts, and maps, Rid- path’s book was timed exquisitely. The failure of Bryant and Gay to complete more than a single volume of their projected multivolume work within a year of the Centennial meant that the market was wide open.31 Additionally, Ridpath took advantage of the strong nationalist impulse at work in the Centennial year by using history in the service of cultural revitalization. To this end, he sought to be as thorough and compelling as he could in his narrative, hoping to combine the objectivity of facts with the subjectivity of historical assessment. For these reasons, A Popular History of the United States represented an important intellectual moment in the development of the genre of popular history. In the pages of his book Ridpath also anticipated the questions with which Bryant and Gay later wrestled and on which the future of the genre depended increasingly, namely, Is it possible to write a spirited narrative account of Amer- ican history without allowing the storytelling functions of narrative to distort the facts of the American past? Can “real history” as scholars understood the term ever be popular or serviceable to its general readers? Ridpath sought answers to such questions not so much in the classroom as in the popular literary marketplace, which increasingly became his testing ground for ideas in the 132 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 132132 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM 1880s and beyond. Entering the popular book market meant playing the game on the terms of Lippard and Frost among others, and that, in turn, required his publisher to engage in some of the hyperbole necessary for mass sales. “Distributing agents” for the subscription book were given a lavish handbill that declared the author “a profound thinker, a brilliant lecturer, a fascinating writer, and one of the most successful historical educators in the country.” Anxious to “supply the popular demand for a book which should record th[e] marvelous story” of the United States, Nelson and Phillips publishers described the work as the only history of its kind, both “rigorously accurate” and characterized by a “power of vivid, forcible and picturesque description” that is “as remarkable as it is delightful.” A Popular History of the United States was “so rich in historical incident, so instructive in its method of presentation, and so brilliant and fascinating in its narrative,” the advertising circular noted, that it “ranks with the best specimens of English Literature.” Americans evidently had found their Sir Charles Knight.32

“An Accurate and Spirited Narrative”

The challenge for Ridpath in producing a work such as A Popular His- tory of the United States was to ﬁ nd ways to reach the common people without compromising the rules of historical inquiry he had urged on his students. Popularizers of an irresponsible sort had succeeded in the former task by catering to the superstitions and myths of “the people,” he noted, but in the latter duty of providing a meaningful context for sober facts they had failed utterly.33 To rectify the imbalance, Ridpath began his popular history with a lengthy and somewhat tortured introduction in which he outlined the complex intellectual ambitions of his work: First among these goals, he argued, was to “give an accurate and spirited Narrative of the principal events in our National history from the aboriginal times to the present day.” This phrasing begged the question that Ridpath’s preface was designed to answer, that is, can one be both accurate and spirited in writing history? A second professed goal—“to avoid all Partiality, Partisanship, and Prejudice, as things dangerous, baneful, and wicked”—seemed to obviate the need for concern regarding the ﬁ rst. Ridpath declared himself committed to preserving “a clear and systematic Arrange- ment of the several subjects, giving to every fact, whether of peace or war, its true place and importance in the narrative” and to providing “an Objective Representation by means of charts, maps, drawings, and diagrams, of all the most important matters in the history of the nation.” A third goal—“to secure a Style and Method in the book itself which shall be in keeping with the John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 133

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 133133 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM spirit and refi nement of the times”—reintroduced the question of literary presentation and obligated Ridpath to a narrative strategy designed to make the facts palatable to readers accustomed to drama in their histories. Such choices made the work of writing a popular history for use by lay people and students an arduous one, and Ridpath admitted during its production that it was the most diffi cult intellectual challenge he had faced in his still young career. “I have labored earnestly to reach the ideal of such a work,” he acknowledged, adding that if success did not reward the effort, the failure will have been “in the execution rather than in the plan and purpose.”34 If scholarly books can be classifi ed by their commitment to accuracy and balance, then Ridpath’s A Popular History of the United States fell squarely into the category of the objective. Fair-mindedness was a central characteristic of the volume. Ridpath’s patriotic fervor for the United States was unmatched, but he was not afraid to indict those historical fi gures who had taken wrong turnings in their pursuit of high American goals. Like Gay, Ridpath could be a “terrible image breaker” if necessary, as he was in recounting the career of Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene. In his description of the battle of Guilford Court-House in North Carolina, for instance, Ridpath noted that General Greene had superior numbers of troops to those of the British commander, Charles Cornwallis, and that if these troops had “stood fi rm,” they would have won the day. Instead, “the raw recruits behaved badly, broke line and fl ed. Confusion ensued; the Americans fought hard but were eventually driven from the fi eld and forced to retreat for several miles.” As the offi cer in charge of the operation, Greene must bear primary responsibility for the breakdown of battlefi eld order, Ridpath claimed, even if he fought valiantly in his own right. At the Battle of Eutaw Springs, Greene was again denied a decisive victory “by the bad conduct of some of his men, who, before the fi eld was fairly won, abandoned themselves to eating and drinking in the enemy’s camp.”35 Despite the fact that most Centennial histories described Greene as “George Washington’s most trusted adviser” and “second only to Washington as a commander of rebel forces,” Ridpath felt obliged to point out his shortcomings as a leader of soldiers. This attack on Greene’s competency was all the more unusual because Greene, who was burdened with fi nancial troubles after the Revolution because of debts “incurred largely in obtaining supplies for these troops,” died a martyr at the age of forty-four in 1786, one of the “un- touchables” by virtue of this sacrifi ce.36 Ridpath was also committed to thoroughness and objectivity as methodological principles in A Popular History. He went to painstaking efforts to provide a rounded portrait of the Puritans, for instance, despite his obvious aversion to their lifestyle and practices. On the negative side, Ridpath believed

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 134134 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM that the settlers of Massachusetts Bay were bigots who, in matters of religion, were “intolerant and superstitious.” Their religious faith, he argued, “was gloomy and foreboding,” and they viewed human life as “a sad and miserable journey.” In such descriptions, he wrote in a spirit befi tting Sydney Howard Gay: “To be mistaken was to sin. To fail in trifl ing ceremonies was reckoned a grievous crime. In the shadow of such belief the people became austere and melancholy. Escaping from the splendid formality of the Episcopal Church, they set up a colder and severer form of worship; and the form was made like iron. Dissenters themselves, they could not tolerate the dissent of others. To restrain and punish error seemed right and necessary,” he noted. On the positive side, however, Ridpath believed that Puritanism contained within itself the power to correct its own abuses. Seeing in seventeenth-century New England- ers the prototypes of eighteenth-century Bostonian patriots, Ridpath noted that within “the austere and gloomy fabric dwelt the very soul and genius of FREE THOUGHT. Under the ice-bound rigors of the faith fl owed a current which no fatalism could congeal, no superstition poison,” he added. “The heart of a mighty, tumultuous, liberty-loving life throbbed within the cold, stiff body of formalism. A powerful vitality, which no disaster could subdue, no persecution quench, warmed and energized and quickened.” For every malicious Samuel Parris or bigoted Cotton Mather among the Puritans, he noted, there was a self-sacrifi cing Jonathan Winthrop or a benefi cent John Harvard to balance the scales. “The evils of the system may well be forgotten in the glory of its achievements,” he noted, but “[w]ithout the Puritans, America would have been a delusion and liberty only a name.” Sober scholarly judgment required historians to admit that the original settlers of New England were “zealous,” “frugal,” and at times justly “despised and mocked and hated,” he concluded, but a more farsighted view of their accomplishments must include recognition of the fact that their “affections and hopes were the coming age’s.”37 In keeping with the lessons he had imparted to his students of history at As- bury, Ridpath embraced “reason” both as a standard by which to judge human behavior and as a methodological device for constructing history. Throughout A Popular History he emphasized the value of the practical over the philosophical. Americans were great, he argued, because they were pragmatists whose utilitarian outlooks protected them from the dangers of abstract dreams. The contrast between American realism and European idealism was nowhere more dramatically demonstrated, in Ridpath’s estimation, than in the case of the farfetched plan of certain British colonial leaders to turn the Carolinas into a model community grounded in abstract principles of governance. In the late 1660s, the political philosopher, John Locke, was employed by Sir Ashley and his associates to prepare a constitution for the region, and Ridpath concluded John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 135

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 135135 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM derisively that the “legislation of the world furnishes no parallel for the pomp- ous absurdity of Locke’s performance.” The treatise divided the Carolinas into districts of 480,000 acres each, and political rights were based on hereditary wealth through a descending hierarchy of dukes, earls, marquises, knights, lords, and esquires, including “every sort of feudal nonsense that the human imagination could conceive of.” It was an “imperial scheme which was to stand like a colossus over the huts and pastures along the Cape Fear and Chowan Rivers,” he mocked, where “heraldic ceremony” would rule over the affairs of “a few colonists who lived on venison and potatoes and paid their debts with tobacco!” According to Ridpath, the settlers of Ablemarle and Clarendon “had been furnished with a copy of Locke’s big constitution, but they had no more use for it than for a dead elephant. Instead of a grand model, a little government was organized on the principles of common sense,” he noted. The “magnifi cent paper empire of Shaftesbury was swept into oblivion,” and they “learned to govern themselves after the simple manner of pioneers.”38 A corollary to this faith in reason was Ridpath’s disdain for irrationality as a character trait. The Salem witchcraft episode furnished the most concrete example of such “unreason.” Characterizing witchcraft as “the darkest page in the history of New England” and the “most fatal delusion of modern times,” Ridpath recounted the details of how a daughter and a niece of Samuel Par- ris, the local minister, were attacked “with a nervous disorder which rendered them partially insane,” causing Parris to give into “his suspicions” that the two girls were “bewitched” by Tituba, “an Indian maid-servant of the household.” The episode might have ended there after a sound and deserved beating, Rid- path noted, except that Parris allowed his irrational jealousies of ecclesiastical competitors in town (such as George Burroughs, who “disbelieved” in witchcraft) to cloud his judgments. Seeing an opportunity “to turn the confessions of the foolish Indian servant against his enemies, to overwhelm his rival with the superstitions of the community, and perhaps to have him put to death,” Parris originated “the whole murderous scheme” out of “personal malice.” The “bigoted” Cotton Mather, a ministerial accomplice in this insanity, “had seventy-fi ve innocent people locked up in dungeons, not a single one of whom was a partisan of Parris by Ridpath’s accounting. Makeshift special courts without suffi cient legal authority were ordered into session; “convictions followed fast, [and] the gallows stood waiting for its victims.” When George Burroughs professed his innocence and recited correctly the Lord’s Prayer, a feat thought impossible for a witch, reason nearly prevailed. “The people broke into sobs and moans, and would have rescued their friend from death,” Ridpath wrote, “but the tyrant Mather dashed among them on horseback, muttering impreca- tions, and drove the hangman to his horrid work.” Eventually the “thralldom 136 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 136136 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3212:58:32 PMPM of the popular mind was broken,” Ridpath concluded, and “[r]eason shook off the terror that had oppressed it. The prison doors were opened, and the victims of malice and superstition went forth free. . . . not another life was sacrifi ced to passion and fanaticism.”39 Commitment to objectivity also required Ridpath to challenge interpretations of past events that had taken on the patina of truth but were not corroborated fully by the historical record. In this sense he shared much in common with the iconoclast Gay, who was hard at work debunking the scholarship of other historians such as Henry Dexter. Ridpath took issue, for instance, with certain historians of his day who had described the New York City “slave plot” of 1741 as a deliberate and ultimately ill-fated violent uprising against abuses by masters.40 Ridpath admitted that slaves had been mistreated and that a few destructive fi res had been set, but he was unwilling to conclude that the incen- diaries were the “bonded servants” of the city. “Some degraded women came forward and gave information that the negroes had made a plot to burn the city, kill all who opposed them, and set up one of their own number as governor,” Ridpath argued, noting that the “whole story was the essence of absurdity.” The “people were alarmed, and ready to believe anything,” however, and in this state of distress, they offered the reward of freedom to any slave who would expose the riotous intentions of others. “Many witnesses rushed forward with foolish and contradictory stories; the jails were fi lled with the accused; and more than thirty of the miserable creatures, with hardly the form of a trial, were convicted and then hanged or burned to death,” he noted. “Others were transported and sold as slaves in foreign lands.” This disgusting display of cruelty not only confi rmed for Ridpath the tragedies associated with irrational behavior, it also exposed the persistence of the racist belief that the slaves had received what they had coming to them. Once the “excited people regained their senses,” the most reasonable of them came to see that “the whole shock- ing affair had been the result of terror and fanaticism,” he noted. Yet irresponsible historians continued to argue for a root cause in the misbehavior of the slaves themselves. Ridpath’s verdict was clearer and less ambiguous: “there was no plot at all.”41 Ridpath’s Popular History was well written but not overwritten. He was careful not to rely too much on overdramatized and glorifi ed portraits of individuals to carry the weight of historical example, focusing instead on understated descriptions of the rise and fall of institutions and idea systems. To supplement these scholarly aims, Ridpath provided readers with learning aids, including synchronic charts of the sort he had used in his classroom for teaching the transitions among historical periods. These aids had been developed originally by an early nineteenth-century Polish general, Josef Bem, who John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 137

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 137137 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM devised elaborate diagrams “listing all the signifi cant events in the history of the world” as a way of teaching the lessons of the past to military students. The strategy was to associate specifi c periods in history with selected colors, which, when arranged properly, would give readers a quick visual reference scheme for periodizing the past. Ridpath was among the fi rst to use this idiographic technique in a popular history, providing foldout charts in which long blocks of color constituted signifi cant periods in the development of the nation. Com- parable shades implied closely aligned events, some of which overlapped into amalgamated hues corresponding with transitional historical phases. It was “History made Visible” as one later marketer of synchronic charts advertised them.42 The historian William Sloane referred to these charts in contemptuous terms when he remarked in 1895: “Middle-aged and older men will remember with some amusement the amazing historical charts which used to adorn the walls of schoolrooms, and resembled nothing so much as rainbow colored rivers vaguely rising at the top, and wandering in viscid streams more or less ver- tically, according to the law of gravitation or the resistance of the medium, until absorbed one by the other, or lost in the ferule at the bottom.”43 For Ridpath, however, these aids helped establish the credibility of his history by providing scholarly guidelines for measuring the passage of time. Ridpath’s use of the Bem method refl ected a perspective on time that was linear, measurable, and more scrupulously scholarly than those of some of his predecessors in the fi eld of popular history. Narrative historians such as John Frost had periodized the past with reference to geographic rather than chronological schemes, telling the complete history of a particular colony from its moment of origin to the American Revolution before backtracking to the early history of its neighbors.44 Even the more careful popularizers Bryant and Gay catapulted on occasion across decades and centuries when it suited their structural purposes.45 Ridpath was guilty of some chronological foreshorten- ings himself, as when he wrote that the affairs of colonial Virginia between 1700 and 1750 were “not of suffi cient interest and importance to require extended notice in an abridgment of American history.”46 Synchronic charts, however, allowed Ridpath to remedy such discrepancies “between the duration of referred-to time and the duration of its representation in textual or discursive time” by providing visual indicators of the “exact proportions of time” subsumed by successive periods “at a glance.” Accuracy in these matters was important to Ridpath given his larger scholarly agenda and the potential con- fusions that could arise from the fact that historic time “is both singular for the moment of dating and continuous for measuring duration.” Since time, as Robert Berkhofer Jr. has noted, is “sequential, external, universal, and yet specifi c to the events that take place,” historians have many potential narrative 138 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 138138 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM options available for depicting its passage. For Ridpath, however, the idea of “the irreversibility of historic time” was the most sacred of these schemes since it allowed him to make assumptions about “causality, contingency, irrelevance, and anachronism” that other popular historians missed.47 Despite these signifi cant efforts to increase the objectivity of his history, Ridpath could not suppress completely those lingering romantic impulses that had been with him since his student days. His was a “popular” history after all, intended not primarily for students but for “the average American . . . who has neither the time nor disposition to plod through ten or twenty volumes of elaborate historical dissertation.”48 Readability was still a high priority, therefore, and Ridpath was not above resorting to some of the more imaginative narrative devices perfected by Frost and Irving in order to attract audiences. David Levin has noted that the trope of the “vanishing, or expelled, or doomed ‘race’ ” was a commonplace in such romantic histories, “inspiring honorable compassion, showing the force of destiny, [and] suggesting one’s proper attitude toward the Indian.”49 We see the same sort of conventions at work repeatedly in Ridpath’s Popular History, especially with reference to Native Americans. “From ocean to ocean the copper-colored children of the woods ruled with undisputed sway,” Ridpath wrote of the pre-Columbian era; by the nineteenth century, however, the race had “withered to a shadow,” leaving only a few thousand “to rehearse the story of their ancestors.” The conquering Saxon subdued the natives with relentless dispatch and hastened the dramatic expiration of a people. “The weaker race has withered from his presence and sword.” Ridpath wrote. “By the majestic rivers and in the depths of the solitary woods the feeble sons of the Bow and Arrow will be seen no more. Only their names remain on hill and stream and mountain.” Slipping into the present tense as a way of increasing the dramatic sense of participation in the events of history among his readers, Ridpath concluded: “The Red man sinks and fails. His eyes are to the West. To the prairies and forests, the hunting- grounds of his ancestors, he says farewell. He is gone! The cypress and the hemlock sing his requiem.”50 Ridpath’s Popular History also included long, poetic refl ections on the character of Native Americans as representative men (women were largely ignored). “To the Red man of the Western continent the chase was every thing,” he wrote. “Without the chase he pined and languished and died. To smite with swift arrow the deer and the bear was the sole delight and profi t of the primitive Americans. Such a race could live only in a country of woods and wild animals. The illimitable hunting-grounds—forest, and hill, and river—were the Indian’s earthly paradise, and the type of his home hereafter.” Resistant to the idea of civil authority “which should subordinate his passions, curb his will, John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 139

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 139139 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM A “Bem Method” chart from A Popular History of the United States illustrating Ridpath’s linear approach to history.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 140140 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM and thwart his purposes,” Native Americans indulged their penchants for war and for “personal, vindictive, and bloody vengeance” on enemies. Though noble savages with respect to combat valor, they were hopelessly fl awed when it came to military principles of justice and humanity. For battlefi eld strategy, Ridpath’s Native Americans relied on “the surprise, the ambuscade, the massacre; and . . . cunning and treachery. Quarter was rarely asked, and never granted; those who were spared from the fi ght were only reserved for a bar- barous captivity, ransom. or the stake. In the torture of his victims all the dia- bolical ferocity of the savage warrior’s nature burst forth without restraint.” They were barbarians whose tools were never “free from the stain of blood” and who succumbed to vices such as alcohol in appalling ways. “The use of tobacco was universal and excessive; and after the introduction of intoxicating liquors by the Europeans the Indians fell into terrible drunkenness, only limited in its extent by the amount of spirits which they could procure. It is doubtful whether any other race has been so awfully degraded by drink,” he concluded in the temperance-minded manner of Gay.51 Nor could Ridpath resist a romantic story on occasion, as his treatment of the John Smith episode attests. As early as the 1860s, New England scholars affi liated with the American Antiquarian Society such as Charles Deane and Henry Adams had begun to argue persuasively that much of what John Smith had said about himself in the General History of Virginia was exaggerated and perhaps untrue, especially the apocryphal Pocahontas legend.52 Gay had supported this line of argument in Bryant’s Popular History over the objections of his coauthor and the advice of Simms. Ridpath, the scholar, might have been expected to join in the debunking of Smith by professionals, but instead he embraced a more romanticized portrait of the captain, a portrayal that bordered on an uncharacteristic brand of hero worship. Arguing that the fi rst settlers at Jamestown were “idle, improvident, dissolute,” and that King James acted “with his usual stupidity” in managing the settlement, Ridpath held Smith up as “the best and truest man in the colony.” Smith’s “strange and wonderful career” was typifi ed by his actions with regard to the Indian attack that left him in captivity, Ridpath noted. Sentenced to death by members of Powhatan’s tribe who had captured him after an impossible defense, Pocahontas rescued the intrepid discoverer in a manner that, as described by Ridpath, suggested how accepting he was of Smith’s own version of events and of Simms’s plea to immortalize it: “Two large stones were brought into the hall, Smith was dragged forth bound, and his head put into position to be crushed with a warclub. A stalwart painted savage was ordered out of the rank and stood ready for the bloody tragedy. The signal was given, the grim executioner raised his bludgeon, and another moment had decided the fate of both the illustrious captive and his colony. But the peril went John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 141

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 141141 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM by harmless. Matoaka [Pocahontas], the eldest daughter of Powhatan, sprang from her seat and rushed between the warrior’s uplifted club and the prostrate prisoner.” In melodramatic fashion she “clasped his head in her arms and held on with the resolution of despair until her father, yielding to her frantic appeals, ordered Smith to be unbound and lifted up. Again he was rescued from a terrible death.” Ridpath saw “no reason in the world” to doubt “the truth of this affecting and romantic story,” and he declared it “one of the most marvelous and touching in the history of any nation.”53 On a few occasions in his Popular History, Ridpath resorted to melodramatic devices more typical of Bryant than of the professional scholars with whom he identifi ed. Sensationalism as a literary convention in the nineteenth century often degenerated into the macabre or the grotesque when popularizers desired to convey truly dramatic meaning.54 This was startlingly evident in Ridpath’s gruesome narrative treatment of the Pequod War in the late 1630s. In discussing the ambush of a village of Algonquins by vengeful New England settlers, Ridpath could not restrain himself from describing in grizzly detail the deaths of hundreds of inhabitants in a ring of fi res set around their encampment. “The yelling savages found themselves begirt with fi re,” Ridpath wrote. “They ran round and round like wild beasts in a burning circus. If one of the wretched creatures burst through the fl ames, it was only to meet certain death from a broadsword or a musket-ball. The destruction was complete and awful. Only seven warriors escaped; seven others were made prisoners. Six hundred men, women, and children perished, nearly all of them being roasted to death in a hideous heap. Before the rising of the sun the pride and glory of the Pequods had passed away for ever.” Returning relatives later discovered “nearly all of their proud tribe lying in one blackened pile of half-burnt fl esh and bones. The savage warriors stamped the earth, yelled and tore their hair in desperate rage, and ran howling through the woods.” Even these “remaining two hundred panting fugitives were hunted to death or captivity. . . . For many years the other nations [Indians], when tempted to hostility, remembered the fate of the Pequods.”55 Part of Ridpath’s purpose here was undoubtedly to sell books, but such excesses were unusually graphic even for the popular history marketplace and were certainly atypical of Ridpath’s early career as a writer.56 Finally, Ridpath moralized in A Popular History in ways that would not have embarrassed Irving or Frost but rankled later scholars. He made occasional use of convenient consolidating themes such as Providence and destiny as a way of tying together disparate elements in his narrative. “Would these isolated provinces in America—now so quick to take offence at each other’s beliefs and actions, and so easily jealous of each other’s power and fame—ever unite in a common cause? ever join to do battle for life and liberty? 142 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 142142 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM ever become a Nation?” he asked. “Such were the momentous questions, the problems of destiny, which hung above the colonies at the middle of the eighteenth century—problems which the future could not be long in solving.” The French and Indian War, Ridpath argued, occupied a central role in the answer- ing of these questions since that confl ict provided the incentive for unifi cation that ultimately sparked nationhood. With “this great event,” he declared, “the separate histories of the colonies are lost in the more general history of the nation” and destiny fulfi lled its purpose of creating a democratic nation out of “the Old Thirteen republics.” Collapsing dozens of themes and subplots into one master narrative or “Great Story,” Ridpath employed the reductionist techniques of Parkman or Prescott to treat large expanses of time. “It is all one story—the story of the human race seeking for liberty,” he concluded of his history.57 It was precisely such high-minded didacticism on the part of Ridpath combined with his profound sense that he was writing at a crucial moment in the history of mankind that encouraged his sometimes exaggerated and self-important tone. The creators of the prospectus for A Popular History did nothing to diminish these claims, noting that “never has there been a time, when it was so necessary that the American citizen should look back and trace the progress of his Country, from its early, humble beginnings, to its present proud position among the foremost nations of the World.”58 In providing evidence both of neutral, scientifi c scholarship and subjective, historical imagination, Ridpath’s History had shared much in common with other hybrid popular works such as Bryant’s Popular History. Unlike Bryant and Gay, however, Ridpath tried to reconcile these two impulses by distinguishing between objectivity as a method and objectivity as an intellectual goal. The distinction bore heavily on ways to draw subjective meaning out of concrete facts. “If to be objective is to be scrupulously careful about reporting accurately what one sees, then of course that is laudable,” Howard Zinn has noted. “But accuracy is only a prerequisite. That a metalsmith uses reliable measuring instruments is a condition for doing good work, but does not answer the crucial question: will he now forge a sword or a plowshare with his instruments? That the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a plowshare does not require him to distort his measurements.” By the same logic, Ridpath did not feel obliged to abjure a set of values simply because they were subjective; he only insisted that the tools used to study the practical impact of those values must be objective in terms of accuracy. “Our values should determine the questions we ask in scholarly inquiry,” in short, “but not the answers.”59 The important intellectual questions for Ridpath in A Popular History of the United States related to the types of literary strategies he should employ to convey the answers he found implicit in his research. What kind of Great Story should

John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 143

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 143143 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM be told from the many subnarratives constituting American history? Should the American past be emplotted as a triumphant self-congratulatory narrative? a cautionary tale? a tragedy? And what prescriptions for the future should be drawn from this record? Ridpath addressed these issues in his conclusion with resort to two structuring metaphors. On the one hand, he used a cyclical analogy to suggest that American history might be spiraling back on itself in hopelessly repetitive ways. “Is it the sad fate of humanity, after all its struggles, toils, and sighing, to turn forever round and round in the same beaten circle, climbing the long ascent from the degradation of savage life to the heights of national renown only to descend again into the fenlands of despair?” he asked. Quoting Lord Byron’s “gloomy picture of the rise and fall of nations,” Ridpath answered with reference to some of the poet’s pessimism as conveyed in the lines: Here is the moral of all human tales,— ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First freedom and then glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last; And History with all her volumes vast Hath but one page! On the other hand, Ridpath posed a linear alternative in which progress was the defi ning characteristic of a human race that, in “breaking the bonds of its servitude and escaping at last from its long imprisonment, [had] struck out across the fi elds of sublime possibility the promised pathway leading to the fi nal triumph.” There were “still doubts and fears—perplexities, anxieties, and sometimes anguish—arising in the soul of the philanthropist as he turns his gaze to the future,” he acknowledged, but there were also “hopes, grounds of confi dence, auspicious omens, tokens of the substantial victory of truth, inspirations of faith welling up in the heart of the watcher as he scans the dappled horizon of the coming day.”60 Such optimistic expressions of the purpose of American history amid the far less sensational catalogue of descriptions of events that characterized much of A Popular History of the United States suggested what a mixed bag popular histories could be at the time of the Centennial. The visible seams of Bryant’s and Gay’s hybrid text could be accounted for by the conditions of its joint authorship, but the fact that a single author displayed both objective and subjective impulses was more diffi cult to explain. In one sense, such a book might be expected to appeal to a wide range of readers, and indeed this one did, selling 100,000 copies within the fi rst few years of release and an estimated 350,000 copies over its publication lifetime.61 Unlike Bryant and Gay, Ridpath met the Centennial deadline of his publisher and reaped the benefi ts of commemorative sales. “Sold

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 144144 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3312:58:33 PMPM by subscription in farm villages and small towns throughout the country,” like those Louisiana parishes Huey Long canvassed, A Popular History of the United States “provided a colorful introduction to history for millions,” wrote one admirer.62 The volume also did much to secure a national reputation for a professor toiling in relative obscurity on the Indiana frontier. Ridpath “is just in his prime, strong, vigorous, well-grounded in a wholesome faith, and ambitious to do all in his power for truth and right, and the dissemination of knowledge,” an Indiana neighbor noted at the height of sales. “His past augurs a brilliant and useful future, and he assuredly deserves high honor, and challenges the broth- erly sympathy and encouragement of good men every-where.”63 Despite the fact that it was a “fair specimen of a book made to be sold by solicited subscriptions,” however, his Popular History proved a partial disappointment to Ridpath. Some professionals, like the young historian-in-training Woodrow Wilson, referred to its “manifest crudeness and inadequacy.”64 Still others raised concerns about whether the work was scholarly enough. “It is, however, but just to say that while written in a style that is free from serious defects, in point of historical accuracy and completeness of information it leaves something to be desired,” wrote the historian Charles Kendall Adams. “By the painstaking student, therefore, it can hardly be accepted as authority.” This same reviewer complained: “the pages of the volume glow with the fervor of patriotism which by some will be deemed a substantial merit, by others a somewhat undiscriminating laudation of American institutions.”65 Still worse, critics judged the volume inadequate in terms of what it could provide average readers and students. In trying to “give leading facts in a simple manner,” J. N. Larned noted, Ridpath failed to convey an adequate sense of the complex drama of history. The “perspective was bad,” since nearly sixty pages of the work were devoted to the Cen- tennial Exposition, Larned concluded, and “social factors [were] almost wholly omitted.”66 For Ridpath, this was the cruelest cut of all, since it implied that despite impressive sales, A Popular History of the United States was not “useful” in the pragmatic sense of equipping readers to face daily challenges. Such a realization disappointed Ridpath greatly, since he was an author who, since college, had striven to change the world with his writings rather than merely write about a changing world. The recognition prompted signiﬁ cant alterations in his life with respect to his career as a teacher, writer, and popularizer.

The Poet-Historian and the New History

The months and years following the publication of A Popular History of the United States were important transitional ones for Ridpath. The most

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 145145 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM signifi cant moment in this period of change was the death of his father in 1877. Ridpath’s admiration for his father was profound, especially his respect for his simple roots and modest values. Abraham Ridpath was “a pioneer, a humble farmer,” and his son never forgot the pledge of humility he took when his role model passed away. “I stood beside him when he died,” Ridpath noted of his father, “I folded his hands over his honest breast, and made a vow. . . . I said, ‘He was a toiler—I will take up the task of his hands and the purposes of his heart. He was one of the common people. I also will be one of the common people. I will love them, and honor them, and defend them. I will believe in them, as he did, and will trust them. IF THEY EVER HAVE A CAUSE, THAT CAUSE SHALL BE MIND. If they have a hope or an aspiration, I will share it. Whoever attempts to injure them, to take away their rights, to oppress them, to enslave them, shall be my enemy—not because I hate or would do him hurt, but because he is unjust and cruel.’ ”67 This commitment to the common people remained with Ridpath for the remainder of his life and was manifested in his subsequent writings. Expressing disdain for “the dainty offspring of our more refi ned localities,” Ridpath refused to think of himself as anything other than a rugged Indiana man defi ned in personality and career by his humble beginnings and by his ambition to write for the masses.68 Ridpath’s commitment to the masses helps explain why he was so discouraged by criticisms of his Popular History. Increasingly throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, Ridpath questioned whether as a professor of history and occasional author of erudite books he was having the kind of impact he desired on unassuming citizens such as his father had been. He spoke with growing concern of the aloofness of his professional colleagues, “those assiduous scholars” and “wrinkled sages” whose “eyes had been dimmed with years of application,” and who sat in “the half-gloom of libraries . . . poring by daylight and lamplight over the faint lines of the man-made pictures we call history! Out of that they would discover the past, determine the laws of human society, and re- organize the world!” he noted contemptuously.69 In order to satisfy his “democratic sympathy with the aspirations of the common people,” Ridpath emerged gradually in the 1880s from the somberness of his scholar’s study into the light of civic community.70 He went on the lecture circuit and delivered addresses on popular themes to local and regional public audiences, including discussions on “Radicalism,” “Poverty and Crime,” and “The Philosophy of Justice.”71 He was especially attentive to the preferences of listeners for contemporary topics. One admirer of Ridpath’s public performances on these occasions noted: “There is nothing perhaps which reacts on his enthusiasm and earnest nature more powerfully than the presence of an audience waiting to hear an address on some theme of current interest. The appeals made to him for public speech and 146 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 146146 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM for incidental writing on almost all manner of topics, and from all parts of the country, would require for favorable answer the labor of several men. Not infre- quently the appeal comes from high quarters, when congressional debate is on, or when questions of national policy are sent to the people for decision.”72 Even in his scholarship Ridpath moved in the direction of more idiosyncratic, less scholarly approaches to the past. Contemplating a history of the Turko-Russian War of 1878, for instance, Ridpath wrote George Bancroft for advice on how to proceed in the matter. Bancroft was widely regarded as Amer- ica’s preeminent historian, and the familiar tone of Ridpath’s note revealed the extent to which he believed himself entitled to membership in a community of scholars in the 1870s. As one might predict, Bancroft instructed Ridpath to place his primary emphasis on fact-fi nding and objectivity of presentation. Bancroft admitted that it was important to occasionally step back to consider the “big picture” and that “you must enliven your work at times by interesting anecdotes,” since “the mind of the reader must be rested sometimes, by devia- tion from the regular chanel [sic] of fl owing facts.” In general, however, he felt that these subjective considerations were distractions to the larger goal which was to assemble the facts in their proper order. Bancroft also advised Ridpath not to publish his book until the war had ended. This suggestion was intended to ensure that the proposed history was accurate and thorough. Otherwise, the revered historian noted, Ridpath would have to rely on contemporary journalistic accounts of the confl ict of the sort that had compromised so many popular histories of the Civil War, such as those by Abbott. “Do not depend too much on newspapers, for you know the truthfulness of their statements is not always to be relied upon,” Bancroft warned.73 This advice, though sound, would have obligated Ridpath to a much longer research phase than he desired and might have threatened the contemporary feel of the project. While Ridpath never completed his history of the Turko-Russian War, it is clear from other projects he undertook in this period that he charted a path independent from that proposed by the exalted scholar. Despite Bancroft’s suspicion of journalistic accounts, that is, Ridpath relied on newspapers for both evidence and audiences, gleaning materials from numerous regional papers for his public addresses and works which were in turn advertised in those very papers.74 In these and other matters he desired to follow his own historical instincts and took pride in his independence from established scholars. “I am not often indebted to anybody for anything,” Ridpath wrote. “I suppose if you should have all the men in the world in a pen and pluck out that one by the pigtail who had had the least assistance from any human being, you would have me by the scalp.”75 Given these proclivities, it is perhaps telling that in 1884, when invitations went out to join the American Historical Association,

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 147147 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM Ridpath did not receive one. Nor was he likely disappointed by the snubbing. Despite having been one of the nation’s fi rst professors of history, he was reluctant to associate himself too closely with professionals, whom he grew to distrust more and more with each passing year. The scholarly temperament of nineteenth-century professional historians, which John Higham has described as “impersonal, collaborative, secular, impatient of mystery, and relentlessly concerned with the relation of things to one another instead of their relation to a realm of ultimate meaning,” became worrisome to Ridpath.76 By 1885, Ridpath’s concerns about the limitations of scholars compelled him fi nally to make an important professional decision; late in that academic year, Ridpath announced that he would be retiring from Asbury University to concentrate on his popular writing.77 Many of his colleagues were shocked and discouraged. Ridpath had become vice president of Asbury and had been instrumental in convincing Washington C. DePauw to give over $600,000 to the college. They could not imagine him leaving the university, and they tried to entice him back with offers of administrative promotions, possibly even the presidency of the college. But Ridpath passed on these opportunities, explaining to friends that he had reached a kind of crossroads and that he was anxious to experiment with some new historical methodologies in the production of several important and popular works of history to benefi t larger audiences.78 His secretary speculated at the motives for his decision: “Dr. Ridpath is by no means a recluse. His activities and words and writings are among the people. He infl uences public thought, and is concerned to keep in touch with what he considers the best movements, political and social, of the times.”79 Many of Ridpath’s scholarly friends did not sympathize with the intellectual direction in which he was moving. Some objected to the larger public profi le he assumed after 1884, because they saw in it a rejection of detached, academic standards. Others worried about the commercial overtones of the decision. Publication in 1885 of Ridpath’s History of the World did little to allay their concerns. Released originally by subscription and then by the Jones Brothers in a three-volume calfskin edition, it expanded later into a lavishly illustrated but unwieldy nine volumes marketed by the Ridpath Historical So- ciety of Cincinnati.80 Several generations of youngsters (including Huey Long and Thomas Wolfe) cut their historical teeth on these pictorial works whose impact in the marketplace for popular books was signifi cant. Money was certainly made on the project, although not primarily by Ridpath. Henry Edwin Sever, for instance, grew up on a Missouri farm and fi rst read Ridpath’s volumes as the principal of a public school. He liked the work so well he quit his job as an educator to take a position as a full-time salesman for the book in the 1880s. He eventually became president of the Riverside Publishing Company 148 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 148148 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM and bought the rights and plates to Ridpath’s History of the World. “[A]fter a large ad campaign to sell the book,” Sever’s biographer notes, “he retired with a great fortune.”81 Others earned more modest remunerations from Ridpath’s efforts. The activist Jane Addams was one of these. She was fed a steady diet of history at home, including Plutarch, Washington Irving’s Life of Washing- ton, and John Clark Ridpath’s “formidable history of the world,” all of which satisfi ed her appetite for “the printed page.” She did not take to such works of history immediately, however; in fact, Addams’s father had to bribe his daughter into reading them. In order to “sweeten these large doses of heavy reading,” John Addams offered her a quarter-dollar a volume, payable once she had been examined on what she had read.82 Such parental concessions to the profi t-motive in reading did little perhaps to dispel the concerns of those already suspicious about the commercialism of the popular book market. Others of Ridpath’s associates at DePauw, some accepting of this change in intellectual direction and others not, regretted the loss of a distinguished colleague. Ridpath found support among a new group of friends, however, who had reputations as popular literary fi gures rather than as erudite scholars. A particular favorite was the Indiana writer Lew Wallace, whose historical novel Ben Hur was sweeping the nation at the time.83 Wallace introduced Ridpath to other members of an informal Indiana literati (known collectively as the “Hoo- sier bards”), who gathered together regularly at literary teas and workshops at which regional literary talent was fêted. They were intensely devoted to region and worked hard to debunk the reputation of Indianians for “boorishness and illiteracy.”84 Ridpath was one of the most devoted of these regionalists. “While most of his contemporary writers from that region have issued from their environment and by throwing themselves into another swim have been easily borne out oceanward to fame,” his secretary explained, “Ridpath has continued in his own place, sturdy and determined to fi ght it out from the home and place of his birth. He is profoundly concerned about the literary reputation of his State, and is perfectly willing to abide the sequel.” Though he had from time to time been distracted by offers of literary work elsewhere—“some literary center where meritorious production and a life of study are more quickly recognized and more immediately rewarded with praise”—Ridpath continued “unmoved in his own place, within a few miles of the site of the low log cabin where he was born, and in view of the cemetery where, on a beautiful hill-crest, his father and mother lie buried. He is strongly bound by all ties of kindred af- fection.”85 So devoted to Indiana was Ridpath, in fact, that he once apologized to friends for publishing a book as far east as “Cincinnati!”86 Filled with exuberance for his newfound circle of friends, Ridpath was among the moving spirits in the creation of the American Association of

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 149149 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM Writers (later the Western Association of Writers or WAW), a group of novelists, poets and short story writers from Indiana and the Midwest who formed a union to encourage the “literary people of the West.” Originally the ambitions of the organization were modest—simply to provide an opportunity for the writing and reading of poetry and to crown “some beautiful young lady . . . Queen of Poesy.” A more inclusive spirit quickly overtook organizers, however, who extended invitations of membership “to the writers of prose and verse.”87 On June 30, 1886, sixty men and women met in the auditorium of the Plymouth Church in Indianapolis to develop guidelines and policies for the association, including literary fi gures such as James Whitcomb Riley, Sarah Bolton, William Dudley Foulke, Meredith Nicholson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booth Tarkington, Will Cumback, Mary H. Catherwood, and Benjamin Parker. They were as high-minded in their rhetoric as were members of Duyckinck’s Tetractys Club, announcing that they would meet annually to “discuss methods of composition, and all topics pertaining to the advancement of literature in America” and to “produce and publish a representative volume of Western authors from the miscellaneous poems, stories, and sketches read during this convention or festival.” They spent hours debating interesting literary questions, such as what the four greatest American novels were, a topic that occupied them for many weeks.88 Ridpath participated actively in such discussions, and, within the fi rst few months of its inception, he was one of the most prominent fi gures in the association. Ridpath and other members of the WAW gathered regularly in Chatauqua- style conventions at Spring Fountain Park on the shores of Eagle Lake near Warsaw, Indiana, to discuss how to facilitate their goals.89 This spot, “with its shady groves of forest trees, it[s] profusion of gushing crystal waters, its lim- pid lake, and withal, its ample hotel and auditorium accommodations,” WAW member George S. Cottman noted, was as inviting as “an Arcadian setting where poets and birds alike might sing their melodious lays.”90 There were formal sessions in which speakers recited poetry and conducted debates on heady topics, such as when Ridpath advanced the question: “Is History Ac- quainted with Providence?” According to a local reporter on hand from the Warsaw Daily News, Ridpath’s “masterly” handling of this topic as rapporteur through “an exhaustive and logical train of argument,” led discussants to the important conclusion that “all history is in accordance with, and is overruled by, the decrees of Providence.”91 There were also lighter moments as well during which WAW members interacted in less structured ways. “Not least among the golden memories of those days is that of the purely social intercourse of long sunny June afternoons when earth and sky and sparkling waters were at their best, and our genial fraternity surrendered itself to sweet-do-nothing,” 150 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 150150 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM recalled one convention-goer.92 Ridpath was an active participant in the playful social life of the organization. He was known for reciting (loudly, as one witness commented) stanzas from Rudyard’s Kipling’s “Vampire” early in the morning from the conference hotel porch as a wake-up call to guests who lin- gered too long in bed. He also lectured on less scholarly topics, such as “Why the Pawpaw is Poetical and the Turnip is Not.”93 The commonly acknowledged leader of this dedicated group of WAW members was the poet James Whitcomb Riley, who was the Midwest’s answer to poet laureate William Cullen Bryant. Riley is often credited with having started a poetry boom in the Midwest, developing a vernacular style that encouraged regional pride in the everyday experiences of Indianians. Ridpath, who took up verse with alacrity in the late 1880s, was one of his most devoted companions.94 The friendship of Ridpath and Riley, which began in childhood and developed in earnest in the convivial atmosphere of WAW meetings, was sincere and lifelong, centered on poetry, philosophical rumination, and cigars. 95 “Although Riley could sometimes be cajoled into reciting verse before the assembled association members, his main contribution to the gathering came when the ofﬁ cial business for the day ended,” a mutual acquaintance, Clara Laughlin, recalled. “Off the hotel’s main dining room there was a small room where Riley and a small group of friends would often gather to ‘banquet splendidly on crackers and cheese, pickles, sweet chocolate, and cold tea,’ ” and ”Mr. Riley was always the dominating spirit, his mood the key in which our pleasure was pitched.”96 Ridpath was always there as well, and sometimes on such occasions he and Riley challenged the women of the association to a “duel by sonnets.” The po- etess, Mrs. [Mary H.] Catherwood, often won the day in these informal compe- titions, but no one managed to out-duel Riley when it came to gaining national recognition for such local color poetry.97 Despite a certain notoriety of his own, Ridpath felt inadequate as a producer of poems when compared to Riley and frequently dismissed the master’s invitations to critique his recitations at association meetings. “It is sinful for me, with my coarser and more scholastic judgment, to handle anything you produce,” Ridpath complained, adding that Riley was “one of the most exquisite artists which our country has produced.”98 For his part, Riley imagined Ridpath (whom he referred to reverently as J. C.) as his literary equal. Both exhibited “an amazing sympathy with common people” that protected each from over-stylized or hyper-scholasticized writing. “When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his work,” a fellow WAW member noted of Riley. “[H]e rarely or never invokes the mythologies, though it has sometimes pleased him to imagine Pan piping in Hoosier orchards. He is read and quoted by many who are not habitual readers of poetry—who would consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 151

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 151151 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM the act of reading poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him because he makes it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere of reality.” Ridpath also shared with Riley a profound desire to win over “the popular heart,” and neither allowed “the restraints of fi xed forms to interfere with an adequate expression of pure feeling.”99 Their professed goal was to popularize the art of the bard to such an extent that every household in In- diana could boast at least one “versifi er.” By some accounts, they succeeded. So prolifi c were Indiana poets after the formation of the WAW, in fact, that according to one witty Indianapolis journalist travelers to the Hoosier state could not help but encounter residents who adopted the fi gurative and literal poses of poet orators. There has “appeared in the community a peculiar crooking of the right elbow and a furtive sliding of the hand into the left inside pocket, which was the unfailing preliminary to the reading of a poem,” he noted.100 For Ridpath and Riley, poetry was a potential mechanism for achieving popular notoriety, and they spoke endlessly of its possibilities. “I tell you, my dear Jamsey,” Ridpath wrote Riley, “it is just delightful to refl ect that you’ve got your hand on the epiglottis of the old engine of fame, and are running her straight into the kingdom.”101 In turn, Riley helped celebrate Ridpath’s greatness, when, on the occasion of Ridpath’s fi ftieth birthday, he penned him a congratulatory poem (“Lines to Perfessor John Clark Ridpath”) that circulated nationally. “But when it come to Intellect—they tell me yourn was dressed, A leetle mite super- ber, like, than any of the rest!” wrote Riley in his homespun manner. “Til now its 102 FAME that writes your name, approvin’, ev’rywhare.” Another less colloquial poem was offered to Ridpath at the same event—“The Poet-Historian”—that acknowledged his gift for fi nding the poetic in things historical: The fi rst, half-conscious, rhythming rhapsodists From vague traditions wove their dreamy thoughts, With fact and fi ction intermingling, wrought; The Classic and the Dark-Age annalists, Then truth was lifted up, till chroniclists Of later times, endued with reason, caught The spirit of philosophy, and brought, Historic records from the realm of mist. Yet History was in the shadows, where Scholastic zealots only found her fair, Till he who loved the Muse’s graceful stroke, Along the bolder lines of truth awoke To duty, and upon the heights of prose, The soulful, song-inspired historian rose.103

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 152152 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3412:58:34 PMPM Such musings pleased Ridpath immensely for what they implied about his capacities for escaping the confi ning restraints of scholarly discourse. Poetry served to widen Ridpath’s vision and to push him toward a more metahistorical outlook than he had embraced as a professor. As important as Riley and the members of the WAW were to Ridpath in terms of cultivating a poetic sensibility, then, they had an even more profound infl uence on Ridpath’s historical vision. Enamored as an undergraduate by the “dreamy thoughts” of Bryant and other epic poets, Ridpath had rejected as a young professor any “intermingling” of “fact and fi ction” in favor of a more detached, scholarly approach to his material. At risk of becoming one of those “scholastic zealots” who studied history “in the shadows,” he had awakened now to “the bolder lines of truth” and had grown to appreciate “the Muse’s graceful stroke.” In things commonplace, Ridpath discovered a much more vivid, poetic element than he had imagined previously. One observer at the Fourth Annual Conven- tion of the WAW noted that in reciting poetry Ridpath retained his “scholarly manner,” his “patriarchal form and beard keep[ing] refractory moonshine poets in check,” but as bard he convincingly “wooed the muses.” The “general merit of his poem was such,” wrote one listener, “that we believed that he has been exchanging furtive glances with the sisters of song for years. We may now, with propriety, say, Dr. Ridpath, the orator, the historian, and poet.”104 As the designated “poet-historian,” Ridpath came close to fulfi lling the hopes of another emerging midwestern fi gure in the historical profession, Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1883, as a junior at the University of Wiscon- sin, Turner had won an oration prize for an address titled “The Poet of the Future,” in which he predicted the appearance of a divine bard of the people. In his recitation, Turner took issue with those contemporary poets who imagined themselves obsolete—“idle singers of an empty day”—because they had nothing of epic value or purpose to proclaim. Turner suggested that the age’s “myriad of inventions, its schools, its newborn knowledge of nature,” were all worthy of celebration. The age was magnifi cent, he argued, “it is the poets that are lacking.” The solution, according to Turner, was to reimagine the “poet of the future” not as some bearded Homer or Ovid with infl ated profi le but as a more unassuming contemporary with a profound interest in the things that matter to common people.105 At the Sixth Annual Meeting of the WAW (at which he presided as president of the organization), Ridpath delivered an address titled “The Democracy of Letters,” in which he echoed Turner’s sentiments, calling for a new, literary voice that would usher in a more relevant philosophy of history, one that gave hope to the average citizen. “Let the man of letters fi nd his inspirations and hopes,” Ridpath intoned, “not in those conditions and precedents which the past has entailed on the present, but rather John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 153

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 153153 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM in his own vision and dream of the better things to come.” The enthusiastic response to this address by members of the WAW suggested that listeners found confi rmation of the fact that in the fi nely turned phrases and richly nuanced expressions of Ridpath’s historical insight he had answered his own clarion call for a new “poetry of history.”106 At times resembling a “mutual admiration society” for underappreciated midwestern artists, the Western Association of Writers was not as well respected outside its own institutional and regional boundaries. In fact, it was criticized roundly by critics in some literary circles who condemned it as an “army of the unpublished” and an affront to the general reputation of Ameri- can literature.107 New York magazines lampooned the WAW as “the Literary Gravel Pit Association” or “The Writer’s Singing Bee,” while other periodicals designated it “a literary house party” hosted by amateurs in “an effort to get up a corner in Spring poetry and fi x the price of manuscript stories at so much a year.”108 Some of these attacks were quite personal, such as the criticisms leveled by Noah J. Clodfelter, who had once been a member of the society that met on Eagle Lake, but who had quit the organization in disgust over the silly, self-congratulatory activities of its “doggerel” poets. Convinced that some of the poetry he shared with members of the association had been stolen by attendees of the conference, Clodfelter vented his rage in a pungent book, The Gotham of Yasmar: A Satire. Punning on the story of the original Gotham, a village in England whose citizens feigned stupidity in order to prevent the King from establishing a residence there, he referred to WAW members as “ephemeral dwarfs,” “cocoanut brains” and “pinheads” who wrote “trashy rot” that future generations would feel compelled to “hold up to ridicule and scorn.” They were simultaneously “vipers,” a “pack of curs,” and “vampires” who had been lucky to escape “the penitentiary.” In an effort to rid the world of their kind, Clodfelter called on “old Gorgon and her poison snake / To drown them all out in old Eagle Lake.”109 In particular, Clodfelter detested “squint-eyed Riley” who wrote verse “too smooth, as if inspired by grog.” He declared that Riley was dead, a “self- destroyer” and “suicide,” whose “weapon was his ‘Child World,’ and it lay Dead as its victim, closely by his side.” Nor did Ridpath escape Clodfelter’s wrath; he was singled out for crimes against both poetry and history. Clod- felter wrote: Dear little toddlers of the W.A.W. We’ll walk alone, and our own chance we’ll take, And row our own boat, but not on the lake Up near old Warsaw, where the little few

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 154154 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM Assemble yearly to praise and review Their own sad efforts which lie cold in death, Where requiems sung are only wasted breath. E’en Ridpath there may chant a sacred mass, Or Riley woo some forty-year-old lass; ’Tis all the same—a corpse must so remain: What corpse was ever known to live again? Ah, such a crowd of would-be’s, by the way!110 These scandalous attacks put Riley, Ridpath, and others in a defensive mood. “Have you seen a copy of the miserable, vulgar, open-mouthed publication made by N. J. Clodfelter in which he attempts to lampoon a lot of us, and yourself in particular?” Ridpath wrote Riley. “It is a little the worst specimen of ignorant, depraved rot that I have ever seen.” Ridpath advised Riley to ignore the foul production, although his detailed correspondence on the subject revealed how hard it was for him to take his own advice seriously. “Of course it is not worth while to care anything, much less to say anything about such a screed, for the writer is far beyond the reach of salvation or damnation,” he explained.111 Ridpath did care about Clodfelter’s comments because he was anxious to convince himself and others that his retirement from teaching had not represented an abandonment of intellectual standards or high ideals. To this end, Ridpath did his part to ensure that the Western Association of Writers was committed to more than just playful artistic expression. As a frequent chair of the program committee for WAW meetings, Ridpath engineered sessions devoted to complex philosophical discussions, such as: “Is History a Sci- ence?” Ridpath’s answer to this challenging query was that studying the past according to strict scientifi c rules was an “unaccomplished but not impossible achievement.”112 Such a response suggested that Ridpath had not given up completely on the positivism of his professional colleagues. Like many in his day, Ridpath “understandably wished to participate in the prestige of science,” and he embraced the scientifi c method as a way “to escape the fetters of uncertainty.”113 The scientifi c discovery of “facts” was the only means to ensure that “romantic story-telling,” so popular in the mid-nineteenth century, would give way to “real history,” he said. But here and elsewhere Ridpath distinguished between applied science and theoretical science, professing that the commitment of historians to the facts was not suffi cient for the full realization of the potential of history as a discipline. The time had come, Ridpath argued in a paper later printed in the Indiana Historical Society Publications, “when the study of mere facts and events, disconnected and regarded singly and without

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 155155 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM respect to the laws of their sequence and evolution, no more could satisfy the demand of reason.”114 Instead of merely stockpiling facts, the kind of activity in which he had been engaged as a professor, Ridpath argued that historians should proceed to broad, poetic generalizations, identifying the universal laws operating in history. The facts and events of our human drama, “however perfectly investigated and known,” he informed readers, “do not of themselves sufﬁ ce.” Unless the “laws of order, arrangement, and causation could be applied to the phenomena of man-life,” he noted, “a knowledge of its aspects and partial developments was of no avail.” Failure to understand universal laws as European historians Henry Thomas Buckle, Auguste Comte, and Hippolyte Taine were at risk of doing, he concluded, rendered all the “romantic episodes with which the libraries of the world are crowded” (read popularizers) as well as “all the painstaking delinea- tions of mere facts” (read scholars) “but inane and empty images.”115 Despite its commercial appeal, much of his work on the three volume compendium of world history published in 1885 had been dominated by the pursuit of facts, Ridpath admitted, but his goal now was to study “all history in such a manner as to specify some universal meaning.” This metaphysical impulse was not shared by the majority of American historians, many of whom were suspicious of large, organizing systems or believed that history was something “given, not ‘theorized.’ ” Facts existed prior to philosophies of history, professional historians argued, and theoretical speculation was held to be “gratuitous and intrin- sically unnecessary.”116 Ridpath disagreed with these professionals, however, insisting that “facts” were neutral and malleable things, dependent for context and meaning on the overarching mind of the metahistorian. Part of Ridpath’s cautions about mere facts came from his new poetic sensitivity to a perceived lack of order in late nineteenth-century American life. As a professor of history, Ridpath had participated actively in the accumulating of factual information, but a fresh philosophical perspective nurtured at Eagle Lake encouraged him to believe that scholarly facts provide only “a world of isolations, of broken parts, of disconnections and capricious individualities.” What he now sought was a means to weave “the threads of law and order” implicit in these objective details into a meaningful pattern. Disassociated facts “appeared to the thought and imagination of the age only as a chaotic ﬂ otsam and jetsam of the seas,” Ridpath wrote in “The Man in History,” “blown up by the lawless winds and thrown in disordered masses along the shores of time.” It was the historian’s job to arrange such materials into “a systematic whole,” determining the laws of sequence and causation operating in the universe. The assumption was that the universe was at its heart an orderly place whose laws of operation were but obscure. “The history of mankind is, in a word, one 156 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 156156 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM complete and ample web” without “a single outhanging thread or broken nap or raveled selvage in its whole time-woven fabric,” he wrote. No fact exists without relevance to others as determined by precise causal relationships. “We might as well attempt to fi nd in the material universe some particles of matter over which gravitation’s law does not extend” as to deny this truth, he argued. With intense enough study by historians, Ridpath believed, the immutable sequences of time could be found along with their “beautiful concomitants of law and order.” History, which was once given over to “chaotic fi re-mist and cloud,” could one day be revealed “in clear outline upon the vision.”117 Designating his WAW philosophy as the “New History,” Ridpath held out hope that it could transcend the petty disagreements between popularizers and professionals—between poetry and science—that had stifl ed historical investi- gations for decades.118 In conversations with Riley and other members of the Western Association of Writers, Ridpath worked out the details of a philosophical system that elevated historical studies to a place of prominence among all intellectual enterprises by virtue of its concern with the developmental features of human experience. Drawing on various evolutionary schemes popular in his day, Ridpath hoped especially to make Darwin accessible to the masses and the theory of evolution useful to historians. This association seemed natural to Ridpath since in Darwin’s system “every experimental proof, each adaptation, variation, or mutation, was also an historical demonstration.”119 “The central principle of the New History is this law of universal causation,” Ridpath wrote. “The bottom concept of it is that everything is caused and nothing causeless; that every fact of our human drama, whether material or immaterial, simple or complex, ephemeral or eternal, is linked to some antecedent fact or facts as its cause and to ensuing facts as its results.” Because the New History substituted the “sequence of events for the events themselves” and “the law of causation for the law of chance,” it was process-oriented, centered on the concept of ongoing change.120 It inspired Ridpath to reconsider the periodizing schemes he had used as a professor at Asbury University to include more overarching perspectives. Since “the course of terrestrial and human development, and hence history, appeared to be infi nitely longer than had previously been supposed,” Bert Loewenberg has characterized the position, “the standard formulas—ancient, medieval, and modern—had to be understood with tempered qualifi cations.”121 With the encouragement of his new friends, Ridpath spent the majority of his time after retirement from Asbury on a new epic project derived from his WAW vision—a multivolume history of the world featuring a new philosophy of history for the masses, the Universal History; or, The Great Races of Mankind (1893). Clearly infl uenced by the evolutionary thinkers of his day, Ridpath’s Universal History undertook to reconcile older scientifi c methodologies with John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 157

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 157157 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM new speculative philosophies.122 In the introduction to the work, Ridpath exposed the limitations of the scholarly principles at work in the study of history at most universities. Traditional history focused on events, he noted, on the “objective nature of the great fact which goes by the name of History” and on the “product or result of human activities.” “If we open the pages of any standard historical work and begin to follow the narrative,” he added, “we shall fi nd it to be an account of the objectivities resulting from the action of the wills and purposes of men.” It refl ected “the residue of man’s activities on the earth. It considered results. It delineated events. It followed the evolution of institutions and described the tangibles of human action and achievement.” Admitting that he, too, had been enamored of this approach while “giving historical instruction in an institution of the higher learning,” Ridpath acknowledged that “the agency by which all this was effected . . . haunted the inquiry more and more, to the extent even of disturbing my studies and confusing my materials.” He revealed to readers that a new mentality had gripped him since his retirement from teaching. “At fi rst the suggestion of the importance of the actors in the human drama, as distinguished from the acts, came dimly and obscurely to view,” he wrote. “Afterwards it became distinct, persistent, and imperative. I found myself sta- tioned between the objective phenomena and the subjective agencies of human story.” Glancing in one direction, he saw “the vast panorama of events, the ar- chitectural remains, the monuments of passing ages, the relics of human activity, the institutional forms of society, the governments and nationalities that have paraded with so much pomp on our vast stage of action.” In the other direction he observed the “races of mankind themselves. The difference between the one class of facts and the other grew as distinct as that which discriminates a statue from the sculptor, a written scroll from its writer, a city from its builders.”123 Noting that the standard kind of narrative (like that of his own A Popular History of the United States or his History of the World) which relates to the “objective facts and phenomena” of history had fulfi lled itself “by repetition and multiplicity,” Ridpath determined “to turn squarely about in the inquiry and take another view of the history of mankind; that is, a view of the human race itself.” By his own admission, this new epistemological vantage point reversed his position in the human landscape, directing him to focus not so much on the “deeds and accomplishments,” which “would be repetition of the author’s previous essays in historical literature,” but on the bigger questions that “haunt the mind and shadow the scholar’s study,” issues that “fl utter about the poet’s dream, and cross on rapid wing the philosopher’s landscape.” In his search for the subjective processes that underlay the objective substance of history, Ridpath speculated on the wider, general forces of the universe at work behind the “palpable facts and events which have hitherto constituted 158 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 158158 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM the subject-matter of history.” He shared a faith in the “scientifi c spirit of the age” and believed that historians could isolate the underlying principles of human development operating at the heart of history by studying with scientifi c rigor the broad patterns of human behavior over time. Revealing the fi rst expressions of what might be called a modernist impulse, Ridpath noted that he was more interested in the process than the products of historical action. “In the new history we might say that there is little concern about the form and expression, but an infi nity of painstaking with respect to the materials of the narrative and an ever-increasing interest in those lines of causation by which all events are held together in a single great event constituting the totality of human life,” Ridpath wrote. “It is almost needless to add that the new history is a creation of the present century, and that by its method and spirit and the signifi cance of its results it is destined to relegate all the previous historical labors of mankind to the place of the materials of history rather than history itself.”124 In the Universal History, in short, Ridpath attempted to establish history as a branch of philosophical rather than just empirical inquiry. A good example of the pretentious sweep of Ridpath’s new WAW-inspired vision can be seen in the opening chapters of his Universal History, in which he attempted to recount the “Time and Place of the Beginning” of the world by arguing backward from the distribution of races. Evolutionary theory begged certain questions, especially those related to origins, which provoked reconsiderations of the relationship of past to present. Discounting the creationist argument concerning the origins of human history, Ridpath considered a wide range of astronomical, geological, and ethnological alternatives before pro- nouncing that it is impossible “to know more precisely the date, the locality, and all the concomitants and conditions under which our ethnic career began.” Noting, however, that such exact knowledge “has its discounts and defects in the treasure-total of our mental wealth,” Ridpath eschewed the tendencies of the “exact sciences” to “reduce all mentality to a formula and mathematical equation.” Lost in the obsession with empirical facts was “the excursive power of the mind,” he argued, an undesirable loss, since the “conjecture, uncertainty, and doubt” of our impressions of the origins of the universe are crucial to “the dream of the artist and vision of the poet,” which add so much to the “treasures of humanity.”125 No longer working to suppress the romantic side of his personality that had appeared fi rst during his college years and resurfaced in WAW meetings, Ridpath now embraced a broad, philosophical perspective on the world that balanced objective fact with subjective but informed speculation. In seeking to identify the universal laws of history, Ridpath revealed the extent to which he had moved in the 1880s from historical scholar to metahistorian. His goal was an ambitious one—to circumvent the debate between John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 159

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 159159 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM scientiﬁ c objectivity and the subjectivity of storytelling by identifying universal laws of historical causation. This was risky because it challenged the pervasive positivism of the age, but his friends in the WAW were largely supportive. James Whitcomb Riley felt he had achieved his goal marvelously: “The four sumptuous volumes of your ‘Great Races’ have reached me—found me—captured and made me a life-prisoner,” he wrote Ridpath. “Simply I stand dazed in wonderment at your accomplishment of this vast work, so thoroughly, symmetrically, masterfully rounded and completed.”126 Others also praised Ridpath’s expansive vision, expressing awe at the sweep of a project that took as its subject the entire history of multiple races and purported to be “an account of the ethnic origin, primitive estate, early migrations, social evolution, and present Conditions and promise of the principal families of men, together with a preliminary inquiry on the time, place and manner of the beginning” of the world.127 Still others marveled at how Ridpath had balanced history and tradition so nicely, proving that popular and scholarly forms could be wedded together.128 Those who knew Ridpath best understood that the achievement was deeply personal. The philosophical dynamism implicit in Universal His- tory was metaphoric of his own life, which, since his retirement from teaching, had been devoted steadfastly to the consideration of the large forces of change operating in his personal universe.

The Inductive Method and History as Politics

One of the challenges Ridpath faced in developing New History as a functioning instrument for the purposes of studying the past was to make the abstract principles implicit in it understandable to the masses. This was especially diffi cult in the fi eld of American history, where a pervasive pragmatic, anti-philosophical strain operated. Ridpath’s solution was to revisit some of his earlier writings on the history of the United States with an eye toward altering the form and story line to accommodate his new system. When the Historical Publishing Company of Philadelphia proposed an update of the 1876 Popu- lar History of the United States in commemoration of the quadri-centennial, therefore, Ridpath agreed readily and spent several months transforming the text into the People’s History of the United States (1895). Some of the changes to the book were cosmetic and external to the narrative, such as the altera- tion in the title from “popular” to “people’s,” which suggested greater public ownership of the text. The work was also “updated,” carrying the story of American history through the 1880s and into the 1890s. In addition, new illustrations were added to the text, refl ecting advances in pictorial reproduction. 160 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 160160 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3512:58:35 PMPM Some of these changes were hurried and did not improve the quality of the original. Historical Publishing, for instance, appropriated images from other texts that were inappropriate to Ridpath’s narrative. In one noteworthy case, an image of revelers titled “Confi rming a Treaty Between Whites and Indians” was used to elucidate the improving relationships between the United States government and Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley during Monroe’s presidency. Curiously, the celebrants appear to be wearing seventeenth-century English garb, an anachronism explained by the fact that the illustration was cropped from a nineteenth-century periodical article depicting the maypole revelries of seventeenth-century renegade Thomas Morton of Merrymount. Unwilling to incur the expense of commissioning an original drawing for the new edition of Ridpath’s history, the publisher made due with recycled images.129 Had these been the only changes to the work, the revision might have been unwarranted, even despite Ridpath’s assurance in his introduction that the “history of our country is a theme which can never be exhausted” and that “familiarity, in this case at least, instead of breeding contempt, adds rather an increasing charm to the story.” Beyond increased charm, however, Ridpath sought to impose his new philosophy of history on the material and to fulfi ll the promise he had made at his father’s deathbed decades earlier by reinventing himself as a champion of the people’s causes. “I have attempted to narrate, not in minute details but in general outline of suffi cient amplitude, the adventures and tentative movements by which the better parts of the New World were reclaimed and brought at length under the dominion of the English- speaking race,” he noted of his broader perspective.130 Ridpath’s strategy of making himself over into a metahistorical populist hero was one that advertisers of his books employed with greater frequency and effectiveness as his career length- ened. “Other men have written histories of one nation or period—Gibbon of Rome, Macaulay of England, Guizot of France,” noted one such promoter, “but it remained for Dr. Ridpath to write a history of the entire World from the earliest civilization down to the present day,” covering “every race, every nation, every time” and in such an “absorbing” style as to hold readers “spell- bound by his wonderful eloquence.”131 That same panoramic vision was now directed inward at the American experience. Among the most signifi cant changes from A Popular History of the United States to the People’s History of the United States was Ridpath’s obvious desire to elucidate the universal laws at work in American history. “History is departing more and more from the methods of the old annalists to depict the movements of human thought and the adaptation of the physical means of amelioration and progress,” he noted. The “American argument had in it a force, a cogency, an element of truth and justice” derived from the larger forces John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 161

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 161161 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM at work in the universe, and the success of the American experiment was due to its synergy with these abstract principles. The American Revolution was therefore “one of the leading incidents of a large and world-wide movement which has not yet by any means reached its limits,” while the westward expansion of the nation was in accordance with “those cosmic laws by which the population of the earth has always been distributed.” The language of evolutionary growth saturated the new text as well. Noting that the history of the United States was controlled by “cosmic laws” operating within distinct scientifi c phases of “attraction and repulsion,” Ridpath began his revised volume not with a treatment of Native American cultures as he had in the earlier version but with a discussion of antiquity and the evolution of ancient races into their American apotheosis. In his introductory chapter, he gave frequent credit to “modern man” for using science to reason out the diffi cult questions of human and national existence in a way that “men of the ancient globe” could not. “The fogs of fear and superstition have been tossed afar by the salubrious wind,” he wrote in sweeping prose, “and though man does not know all, he does know much of the sphere which he inhabits, the nature of things and the system of universal nature.”132 The People’s History of the United States revealed a much greater sensitivity to race on the part of its author as well. In his revised text, Ridpath added whole sections on the Aztecs and Incas that had not appeared in the original, noting that the Native Americans of Central America were quite sophisticated in arts and culture and displayed ample evidence of a “civilized life” that was “scarcely inferior to the existing conditions in the best parts of the world.” Ar- guing that the history of these aboriginal Americans had been written largely by representatives of the “conquering races” in which the “primitive civilized peoples of the three Americas have had no voice,” Ridpath urged a new historical outlook centered on a more balanced assessment of the human race understood globally. By this comparative device, he was able to excuse even the most universally condemned practices of Native Americans, such as human sacrifi ce, by arguing that such customs were in common usage elsewhere. “The Spaniards chose to affect great horror at the religious rites which were practiced by the Aztecs, and particularly at human sacrifi ce,” Ridpath noted. “But the world has failed to balance the account; for even in this particular the cruelties of the Mexican priests were not equal to those of the Spanish Inquisition. It is forgotten that many races have thought it pleasing to the gods to offer human beings on sacrifi cial altars,” he wrote, including the Romans, who, although they “did not sacrifi ce men on altars,” exposed them “to wild beasts in the arena, or compelled them to meet their trained gladiators in the bloody circus.” Suggesting that the distinctions among the physical, mental, 162 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 162162 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM and moral states of peoples throughout world history have been greatly exaggerated, Ridpath linked ancient prejudices to a contemporary American “disregard of the rights of the native races.”133 In A Popular History of the United States Ridpath would have sensationalized these issues; in the People’s History he contextualized them. Ridpath was more sensitive to these matters of race because evolutionary theory encouraged him to see the connections among all peoples and to acknowledge their common obligations to inevitable, universal laws. Editorial changes made by Ridpath to his original text reveal the extent of this new disposition. In the 1876 version of his history, for instance, Ridpath remarked that “on many parts of the frontier” in the late eighteenth century “the malignant Red men were still at war with the settlers.” In the 1895 edition, however, Rid- path altered the sentence to convey a stronger sense of victimization on the part of Native Americans. “On many parts of the frontier the Indians, for good reason dissatisfi ed with their displacement from their ancient hunting-grounds, were hostile and did not hesitate to make war on the American frontiersmen,” he wrote. Elsewhere, in the fi rst iteration of the work, Ridpath noted that in a sixteenth-century confl ict between the Aztecs and the Spaniards, the Euro- peans prevailed when “[d]ismay seized the hosts of puny warriors, and they fl ed in all directions.” In the People’s edition, however, Ridpath removed the offensive insinuations of Aztec ineptitude and merely recorded: “A great battle was fought in which the Spaniards were victorious.” In the fi rst edition of the work, Ridpath also discussed discovery as an impulse and a “right” among Eu- ropeans, while in the second he questioned this sense of prerogative, noting that the claim of “fi rst view” by European explorers did not give the “slightest attention” to the “rights of possession and occupancy enjoyed for unknown generations by the native peoples of new lands.” All the claims of the aboriginal races “were brushed aside as not of the slightest consequence or validity,” Rid- path recorded with disgust, adding that a more balanced perspective on Span- ish conquest marked it as one of the most usurpatious acts in human history.134 Ridpath’s New History also encouraged him to rethink the question of human agency and free will in the story of the past. At the time of the Centen- nial, Ridpath was not above glorifying certain individuals—John Smith, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln—as symbols of the enormous power of human beings to affect the course of history. By the 1890s, Ridpath had replaced “Great Men as the decisive historical agents in favor of homme meme (the anonymous human)” and rejected “excessive concern with individual motivation that had led to a superfi cial, event-oriented history (histoire historisante).”135 Hence, Ponce de Leon went from a “wrinkled old cavalier” engaged in a quixotic search for a fountain of youth in A Popular History, as Simms imagined him, to a man

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 163163 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM who was forced to succumb to the inevitable fact that the “law of nature had prevailed over tradition” in the People’s History.136 George Washington, once “the serene Father of his country,” was now depicted as “the son of a larger country—the country of human liberty.” Columbus had led the “greatest secular event in the history of mankind” and had been crowned “immortal,” but it was “History,” Ridpath insisted, that “made the Man –made him and gave him the world.”137 Even the leaders of the vaunted Republican party, which “had been in power continuously for twenty-four years,” during which period “great and salutary changes had taken place in the social condition and civil polity of the American people,” were criticized by Ridpath because they were inclined wrongly to think that they “should claim the result as their work, when as a matter of fact it was simply the evolution of the age.”138 Hubris breeds contempt for universal systems, and it is here, Ridpath argued, “that the delusion begins which makes man—the individual—to be the author of history.”139 Despite the “puny efforts of the men who sometimes vainly imagine that they make human history,” Ridpath concluded, it is the cosmic forces concretized in fundamental systems of law that truly rule the day.140 These editorial changes made to successive versions of Ridpath’s popular history are revealing for what they suggest about the alterations their author had undergone in terms of intellectual outlook, especially with regard to his philosophy of history. Not everyone was enamored of the revisions from the Popular History to the People’s History, of course, least of all some professional historians who saw in them a reversion to mid-nineteenth-century idealism. Although acknowledging that in books such as Ridpath’s “specifi c statements of fact are more numerous” than in other popularizing texts, the president of the American Historical Association, George. B. Adams, pointed out that “one does not need to read far” in any such works “to perceive the controlling infl uence of the imagination in the new history in comparison with the stricter scientifi c faculties, and the constant occurrence of sweeping generalizations, charming to the reader and attractive to the mind, until they are submitted to cold analysis.” Adams feared historians such as Ridpath were “passing from an age of investigation to an age of speculation.” The tendency toward abstraction frightened Adams because he believed history was a science, and, like all true sciences, “must rest upon proved and correlated fact.” All “premature generalization, all generalization from hasty observation, from half-understood facts, is useless and often worse than useless,” he noted.141 Ridpath’s work smacked too much of old-fashioned speculative history and threatened to set historical studies back half a century. “[N]ext to literature,” John Higham has suggested, early professional historians dreaded especially teleological systems that were too arbitrary and “preconceived.”142 The Harvard professor of history Ephraim 164 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 164164 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM Emerton felt as if he was “meeting once more the ghost of our ancient enemy, the philosophy of history” in reading such works. His students might dabble in such literature at odd moments of dalliance, he wrote, but only after they were fi rmly grounded in the scientifi c method; philosophy of history was a “dangerously speculative subject better reserved for later years in any deep way.”143 Of great concern to scholars was the presumption by philosophers of history that they knew which higher laws were operating with the greatest relevance for the human condition. Some critics demanded more exact standards of authenticity for the identifi cation of actual universal laws and wondered what distinctions could be made between these covering models and the subjective, mythological patterns of interpretation advanced by romantic storytellers. For scholars who had worked so hard to establish objectivity as the foundation of historical explanation, for instance, the metahistorical devices used by Ridpath in a work such as A People’s History of the United States seemed just another type of mythic overlay designed to distort the historical record by promoting pet theories of causation. “A systematic science of history threatened to subordinate history again to philosophy just when it was winning independence,” Higham has written. “In the face of this jurisdictional confl ict, a fi xation on the criticism of documents and the patient accumulation of facts hardened” among scholars. In condemning such books as Ridpath’s, professional historians res- olutely affi rmed their commitment to empiricism as a “reaction against positivistic theories,” on the one hand, and “romantic subjectivity,” on the other. Still more maddening to critics like G. B. Adams was the fact that speculative philosophies of history such as Ridpath’s “had usurped the name of science” in their quest to fi nd universal laws while eschewing scientifi c methods.144 Professionals distrusted universal law “with its declamatory character and its assertion of progress without theoretical proofs” and elevated to the status of historical truth “only statements based on direct observation.” All others “not accessible at all to proper verifi cation were declared meaningless.”145 For these reasons, Charles Kendall Adams’s A Manual of Historical Literature criticized Ridpath as a popular writer who could “hardly be accepted as authority” by the “painstaking student.”146 William W. Carson added that “the enormous quantity and scope of his work . . . precluded that scrupulous regard for fact and reliance on authority that characterizes the more scholarly historian.”147 Ridpath countered such arguments by claiming that his new philosophy of history was derived from laws of explanation inherent in the objective facts themselves. While Lippard and Frost attempted to make historical facts conform to preestablished interpretive schemes, Ridpath claimed that his guiding principles sprang from those events which were the outward expression of the universal laws themselves. In this sense, facts were prior to interpretation and John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 165

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 165165 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM informed its structure.148 For speculative philosophers such as Ridpath, the artifacts of the phenomenal world were the starting point for an understanding of larger abstractions. “Emphasis on the discovery of data and the inductive process made it possible for the historian to perform his scientifi c function with a minimum of bias or preconception” in the late nineteenth century, like- minded Henry Adams believed. “He did not ask any questions until he had the data of the document; he asked them only thereafter and then only in accordance with the rules of scientifi c procedure.” In other words, the methods of Adams and Ridpath were not Plato’s. They “did not seek ultimate meanings in a transcendental world beyond earthly experience”; rather they sought “universal meanings in the welter of particulars.” To “avoid controlling ideas and to permit the facts freely to testify” one must advocate “the untrammeled search for undiluted facts. Only after as many facts relevant to the problem were collected and arranged in proper chronological and schematic sequences was generalization possible.”149 Skeptics were inclined to believe that philosophies of history such as Rid- path’s raised more questions about historical meaning than they solved. How do we even know what the facts of history are, for instance? Facts are presumed to be tangible things with verifi able shape and unquestioned ontological substance; but, as Carl Becker later noted, on further investigation, “the simple historical fact turns out to be not a hard, cold something with clear outline, and measurable pressure, like a brick: but ‘only a symbol’ whose meaning is drawn from its relationship to other ‘facts.’ ” Everything about the past is relative and relational, according to this thinking, and must be understood in its context. Becker even advanced the radical suggestion that we can never verify past “reality,” since “facts” are constructed from memory and are subject to the very imaginative acts of recall we associate with fi ction.150 As noted earlier, most historians in the nineteenth century operated from a less skeptical point of view, embracing a philosophy of ontological realism based on “the belief that historical inquiry refers to a ‘real’ past that was once, but is no longer, present, and that written histories are valid to the extent that they accurately correspond to this real past” by rediscovering “the facts.”151 In this sense there is only one past, and the best historians are the ones “who tell its story with the most thorough reference to the discrete facts and come closer than others to “a single ‘right’ version.” But even here challenges emerged. Provided we could agree on what facts are, how do we distinguish among facts? Which are the greater facts among equals? Even Ridpath understood that the principles historians used to select which facts to employ in their stories determined the kind of history they created from the facts. Two historians using the same materials can and have written very different histories, he recognized. He himself 166 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 166166 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM had experienced that inconsistency in consecutive editions of his popular history. And what of rhetorical questions of reason and proof and persuasion? There are many ways to make a case, after all. Professionals took seriously the dictum that: “[a]lthough a single fact can ‘disprove’ an interpretation, no number of facts can defi nitively ‘prove’ one.” In this sense, “narratives thus create their facts as much as facts create the narrative.”152 Given these conceptual complexities, many scholars were inclined to dismiss systematic philosophical schemes such as Ridpath’s and to argue that, as Berkhofer summarizes, “speculation about the ultimate meaning of History as a totality stands outside the pale of professional discourse.”153 If scholars such as G. B. Adams and Emerton worried about the prospect of personal (even partisan) opinions masquerading as universal laws infi ltrating works such as Ridpath’s, their fears were confi rmed by the heightened political tone of the last chapters of the People’s History of the United States. In original sections covering events since the Centennial (and therefore not treated in A Popular History of the United States, published in 1876), Ridpath was very direct and opinionated in his judgments concerning various American social crises and their relationship to laws of the universe. He sided with workers in the railroad strike of 1877, for instance, who endured a ten percent drop in wages, but he rejected the “infl ammatory” tactics of the communists and socialists at Haymarket Affair in Chicago. He eschewed “the arrogant face of monopoly,” but he disliked the “insurrectionary front of the working classes,” especially the “large mass of ignorant foreign labor” who contributed “a class of ideas utterly un-American.” Ridpath was particularly outspoken about party strife in politics, which he blamed for the poor functioning of American political systems. “To the calm-minded observer it appears a thing of wonder that the people of the United States have so far permitted themselves to be cajoled, hoodwinked brow-beaten, converted into camp-followers and slaves, by the ignorant horde of interested adventurers who have arrogated to themselves the right of civil and political control over the destiny of the American Republic,” he wrote. Such seditious language suggested how far Ridpath had strayed from the detached voice of the scholar. Like William Cullen Bryant, he railed against protective tariffs which contributed to “all manner of jobbery and extravagant expenditure” and allowed monopolies to work “against the common interest of the people as a whole.” And the repeal of the Sherman Act was characterized by him as “a series of intrigues the history of which as hereafter written will constitute the most terrible arraignment of American statesmanship to be found in all our national annals.”154 For Ridpath, history as a form of discourse was tied to hegemonic issues of social class and political power, and he did everything he could in the People’s

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 167167 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM History of the United States to underscore the detrimental role of class confl ict in the late nineteenth century. Interested in promoting the concerns of the “common people,” he pointed to the unfair ways in which American laborers were disadvantaged constantly by monied interests. This implicated him in a radical new historiography that was changing the way historians approached historical evidence. “When the age of masses began, somewhere in the late 1800s, historians were badly prepared for it,” Ernst Breisach has written. Peas- ants and workers had not been represented in most historical works of this period. “Theirs had been an anonymous presence marked by no means than the routine cycles of birth, growth, work, marriage, reproduction, illness, and death. Intermittently the ‘common’ people had revolted or had been victims of catastrophes and on those occasions had received brief mention.” Such historians had been blind to the story of the “common people” because the sources they consulted—diplomatic, political, and military records—were directed at elites.155 Ridpath’s new outlook, however, exposed the conservative underpinnings of such a historical tradition by acknowledging its ideological predispositions. As the DePauw graduate Charles Beard later noted, “written history that was cold, factual, and apparently undisturbed by the passions of the time served best the cause of those who did not want to be disturbed.”156 There was something vaguely Marxist in this “people’s history,” Ridpath sharing with Marx a conception of history as an “instrument of oppression directed against those who are struggling to change the productive relationships in accordance with the dictates of history.” Put more simply, both thinkers believed that history is the means by which “the exploiters hold the exploited in check”157 No wonder populists and fi scal radicals such as Huey Long were attracted to Rid- path’s popular histories. Given his fl irtation in the People’s History with class ideologies, one might expect that Ridpath would have succumbed to some of Marx’s fatalism as well. He managed to avoid it, however, by clinging to a sense of nascent possibility implicit in the laws of the universe and emerging naturally from the facts of history. In concluding his 1876 Popular History, Ridpath had asked: “What, then, of the outlook for the American Republic?” By 1895, he was ready to advance some partial answers. At the time of the Centennial, Ridpath had hinted at the potentially “sad fate of humanity,” modern nations spiraling back on themselves, as it were, to repeat the mistakes of ancient civilizations in fulfi llment of Lord Byron’s gloomy prophecy that “History with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.”158 Despite his lingering concerns for the problems of government and labor, Ridpath concluded his People’s History with an alternative and rousing passage of assurance: “The History of Our Country has thus been recited from its discovery by the adventurers at the close of the fi fteenth century

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 168168 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3612:58:36 PMPM down to the present time. The story is complete!” he wrote. “Our Republic has passed through stormy times, but has come at last in full splendor and with uplifted banners to the dawn of the great anniversary which is to commemorate the discovery of the New World.” Noting with happy and perhaps naive confi - dence that “Peace and tranquility are abroad” and that “Clouds of distrust and war have sunk behind the horizon,” Ridpath concluded that “Here at least the equality of all men in rights and privileges before the law has been written with an iron pen in the Constitution in our country. The union of States has been consecrated anew within our memories by the blood of patriots and the tears of the lowly. Best of all, the temple of Freedom reared by our patriot Fathers still stands in undiminished glory.” These successes were especially meaningful to Ridpath because they were produced by the insights of historical refl ection. “THE PAST HAS TAUGHT ITS LESSON, THE PRESENT HISTORY HAS ITS DUTY, AND THE 159 FUTURE ITS HOPE,” he concluded. Ridpath’s outlook for the future of the United States was not always as optimistic as this conclusion would suggest; indeed, as we know from his college journals, Ridpath was prone to fi ts of moodiness and even despair. He viewed it as his responsibility to give some hope to the common reader, however, especially in light of the alarming threat of rapidly accelerating forces of change. The production history of Ridpath’s popular histories, especially the transition from the scholastic Popular History to the more abstract People’s History, reveals the degree to which the climate of receptivity for such works was dependent on the willingness of authors to stay current in their writings and of readers to “buy into” the ruling social and political imperatives implicit in them. As this language of the commercial marketplace would suggest, part of Ridpath’s incentive for issuing new editions of the same work was fi nancial, since republishing standard popular books with slight modifi cations and updates was easier than writing new ones. The extent of Ridpath’s substantial revisions would suggest, however, that he was also motivated by the earnest desire to rethink and rede- sign his entire intellectual approach to history, seeking ways to make his universalizing strategies accessible to the American people. In other words, it was not suffi cient for him merely to be a metahistorian reliant on abstractions or a scholar content in the knowledge “that whatever is of historic worth is likely to live of itself.” As a popularizer, Ridpath recognized that it was his duty to “in- tensify an interest in historical matters in order to preserve them.” In this sense, preservation was not a passive but an active concern. “There are certain things more hard to kill than others are to be kept alive,” he argued, and it was the historian’s job to distinguish among them.160 Increasingly in the years following the publication of the People’s History, Ridpath advanced this activist ethic by making the transition from metahistorian to political and social reformer.

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The People’s History of the United States may not have satisfi ed professional critics, but it served Ridpath’s growing need to make history serviceable. He recognized that his need to feel more useful was a natural reaction against his scholar’s “preoccupation of minutiae.” One of the “dangers of aca- demicism,” John Higham has noted of the period, was that the obsession with facts meant that “the larger action of the intellect clogged.”161 To remedy this condition, Ridpath increasingly politicized his work in the 1890s, challenging the culture of consensus that had emerged on many fronts among scholars and those who based social policy on professional insights. Aided by the name recognition that went along with publishing evocative popular works like the People’s History and benefi tting from their use as a platform for the circulation of his political beliefs, Ridpath also began to exercise a strong political infl uence in Indiana in the 1890s. He had not indulged his political ambitions since college, but in the fall of 1896, he was nominated for Congress by the Democrats and Populists in his state who wished to break the Republican stronghold of his home district, and, despite his long affi liation with the party of Lincoln, Ridpath accepted the challenge. Translating into political action his historian’s concern for the common man, he campaigned vigorously for William Jennings Bryan and the free silver platform as well as for greater use of public monies for social reform.162 Although defeated in the election, Ridpath caught the attention of Benjamin Flower, a reformer and founder of the Union for Practical Progress, who liked the historian’s newspaper and magazine campaign articles applying historical visions to the questions of social injustice. As a consequence of this Indiana canvass, Flower invited Ridpath to become editor of the Arena, a social reform periodical with over 100,000 subscribers. Ridpath accepted the position in 1897 because it afforded him the most direct mechanism for getting his political message to the people. As he explained to friends and family, his acceptance was not a rejection of his identity as a historian but rather an attempt to expand the available audience for the expression of his historical ideas.163 In both capacities he imagined himself a spokesper- son for the “unemployed and powerless.”164 Because the Arena was published in Boston (and later, New York), Rid- path’s decision to assume the editorship of the magazine was undoubtedly a diffi cult one, since it required him to leave his beloved Greencastle and to im- merse himself in the heart of urban, Eastern darkness. The move suggested the extent to which, as editor of the Arena, Ridpath had taken to heart the journal’s philosophy as proclaimed on its title page in a quote by Heine: “We do not take possession of our ideas, but are possessed by them. They master us and 170 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 170170 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM force us into the arena, Where like gladiators we must fi ght for them.” Articles in the early editions of the Arena under Ridpath’s management refl ected this gladiatorial attitude, including hard-hitting pieces on “The Concentration of Wealth: Its Cause and Results,” “The Multiple Standard of Money,” “Studies in the Ultimate Society,” “General Weyler’s Campaign [in Cuba],” and one by Ridpath himself called “The Cry of the Poor.”165 This latter piece was as close to polemic as Ridpath had ever written, and he felt obliged to defend its tone to those back home accustomed to a more dispassionate style. Ridpath explained to his WAW friend James Whitcomb Riley: “This Arena magazine which I have in charge is, you know, fi rst of all a magazine of Public Opinion. Strictly speaking, it is literary only in the secondary sense.” Despite the negative tone of most of the editorial features he produced, Ridpath claimed to be energized by the fast-paced, hard-hitting realism of his task. “[A]t the present time I am working like a tar, day, evening and night,” he added, “sleeping at my desk and eating on the fl y.”166 Such comments revealed the degree to which the transition from popular historian to social reformer was an easy one for Ridpath. After all, in both capacities he dealt with public opinion and in the shaping of national ideals. The Arena was always a magazine, as reviewer W. T. Stead noted, “with strong sympathies for the people,” a commitment Ridpath longed to embrace and sustain.167 Those at home detected a certain reversion to idealism in Ridpath’s writing when he turned social reformer. Ridpath, however, found nothing inconsistent between his editorials for The Arena and his commitment to objectivity and realism as a historian. Editor Flower recruited writers, artists and poets to his cause in an effort at “acquainting people with the terrible facts as they exist,” and he placed special emphasis on presenting the “squalid facts” which would allow people to “face the exact truth in all its hideousness.” The magazine owner was fond of saying: “Nothing is so wholesome as candor.”168 This faith in the power of facts was in keeping with Ridpath’s philosophy of history; Rid- path sought merely to elucidate “social facts” that could be “ascertained and examined for those large-scale ordering forces that really matter in society.”169 Despite Flower’s call for a stark brand of social realism, however, Ridpath found suffi cient editorial leeway to indulge the latent forms of sentimental expression. His Arena article “The Cry of the Poor,” for instance, is overwritten in many places, serving as a literary equivalent to the artist J. G. Brown’s mawkish street urchins, who prompted reform through exaggerated depravity rather than frank portrayal of destitution. “Whoever will put his ear to the earth may hear the moan of the dying,” wrote Ridpath fervently. “Oh, it is pitiful! The great regions of Asia are strown with the decaying carcasses of the wretched beings that have died before their day from sheer want of the means of living John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 171

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 171171 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM longer. . . . The teeming islands of the sea, beautiful and fertile, are little more than pauper sepulchers that have swallowed up emaciated humanity until the very earth is a cake of man-mold, rimy and poisonous.” And, lest anyone assume that such horrors were confi ned to foreign shores, Ridpath added in accusatory tone that “the portent of pauperism is already on the horizon of America.” When he was a boy, Ridpath noted, “plenty” was the call word of the nation as “young fathers cleared new fi elds, and young mothers, the angels of the wilderness—God bless their memory!—rocked the cradles in which fat boy babies, with the spirit of the gods upon them, slept or crowed as the swelling ripple of life fl owed through their healthy souls.” But now, that vision was in jeopardy. “Unless the baneful forces that are now rampant in our civilization can be reversed, our land also will become—aye, it is becoming—a receptacle for millions of famished dead.”170 Ridpath’s new agenda suggested the distance he had traveled since he fi rst began producing popular histories in the 1870s. In A Popular History of the United States, published at the time of the Centennial, he was loath to say anything negative about American culture, least of all about its political leadership. By the 1890s, however, he was outspoken in the pages of the Arena about the failure of American politicians, especially Republicans, and far less sanguine regarding the future of American enterprise. After the Civil War, Ridpath noted in melodramatic fashion reminiscent of Bryant, “There were men—a large group of men—who were then alert while the nation was asleep. They began to intrigue before the smoke of battle had cleared away. They got hold of the industrial, economic, and fi nancial forces of this reviving nation and deliberately turned them from the course of nature and justice to the course of injustice and iniquity.” Condemning these gold-bugs for their usurious behaviors, he accused them of robbing the people of their treasures and of “draining the blood and breath of our national life.” Whereas in the People’s History of the United States the politicos who brokered the McKinley Tariff Bill were declared disciples of “jobbery and extravagant expenditure,” in the Arena they were ridiculed as the evil creators of a “debt-beast” that compelled Ameri- can taxpayers to toil “on the apron of a treadmill—slipping back into lower and still lower industrial, economic, and political conditions” until crushed by “their own inert weight.”171 Ridpath’s proposed solution to such abuses was to threaten these political beasts with a bloody revolution of the people. Address- ing them personally in the pages of his journal, Ridpath warned menacingly that “the future will come down on you like night, and your children’s children, visited with a fate worse than that which you now infl ict on the children of the poor, will damn you for your sin and folly.”172 Referring elsewhere to McKinley Republicans as part of a “malevolent agency” whose “iniquities and

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 172172 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM devilish schemes” had brought upon the American people the “mortgage of Shylock,” Ridpath remarked contemptuously on the “long chase of delusion and false cry and mockery that this party of prosperity and Mephistophelian intrigue, this party of double dealing and ambiguity, this party of fraud and feculence has led you.”173 Such partisan expressions caught the attention of periodical-reading Re- publican Midwesterners who supported McKinley, some of whom questioned openly Ridpath’s abandonment of the party and his standards of editorial judgment. The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that the suspension of the Octo- ber 1898 issue of the Arena for fi nancial reasons was “signifi cant proof of the rapid dissolution of the 16 to 1 heresy and [of the] abomination” overseen by Ridpath’s “rabid free silver magazine.”174 Questions were raised as well about the ease with which Ridpath switched political affi liations when partisan issues required it.175 “Dear Riley,” wrote a concerned Hoosier to the Indiana poet: “Ain’t it too awfully bad that our good friend J. C. R. has bolted off into the Democratic party ‘foot horse and dragoon’?”176 George H. Lepper, a lawyer from Pittsburgh with an interest in politics, was even more incredulous about the “convenience” of Ridpath’s politics. He reassured an Indiana writer, George W. Julian, that Ridpath’s “inappropriate” response to an article that Julian had published in the Arena was not worth worrying about. Referring to the “boorish and narrow manner” in which Ridpath had “answered” the piece, Lepper claimed that Ridpath was “prone to want the policy of The Arena as that of TRUTH, which, duly interpreted, signifi eth what–Dr. Ridpath–thinks.” Lepper noted that he had had a similar incident with Ridpath in which the editor invited the lawyer to contribute a piece on bimetallism and then “spat” out a deprecatory response. The “Doctor is too much given to spitting in his polemical writings,” Lepper argued. “He spat so violently at me” that “I har- bored the hope [to no avail] that he had run out of saliva.” Ridpath “may be a fair historian,” Lepper conceded, “but as a progressive and comprehensive thinker he is a rank failure.”177 Ridpath was undeterred by these criticisms, charging back in the Arena that his midwestern friends were being deceived by “a conspiracy on the part of international bankers to enslave the world in gold-standard chains.” “You can accept this situation if you want to accept it,” he warned his former colleagues. “If you have no more love of freedom, no more patriotism, no more sense than to accept it, why, then, accept it, and be slaves forever. If nothing will arouse you, why, then, sleep, sleep!”178 The political attacks Ridpath sustained for the sake of his causes implied that the cost of social and political reform might be the very popularity he craved in his histories. But the expense seemed worth paying to Ridpath because he viewed public service and popular writing as

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 173173 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM virtually synonymous activities. Certainly he did not imagine himself compromising his reputation as a historian by pursuing his political agenda in periodical literature; rather he believed that intellectual standards and commitments could be maintained best amid the fl ying of political fur. This confi dence was attributable in part to his longstanding attention as a popularizer to effective modes of public presentation. Recognizing that books “are no longer profi t- able” to their authors, and that a writer “to-day will make more on the average out of a story published as a magazine serial than out of the same story in book form,” Ridpath reasoned that in the future the periodical format would exercise a still stronger infl uence on the American mind, requiring even more sophisticated exchanges among readers, publishers and writers.179 Critics of the Arena included not only those who rejected its specifi c political message but also those who objected to its general mixing of history and social reform. Even in an age when Progressive historians were beginning to fi nd practical applications for historical learning, such blatant proselytizing seemed inappropriate to many professional historians.180 Turning “ideas into ideologies,” reformers such as Ridpath who pushed for “a political agenda” were accused of “not seeking to stabilize truth but rather to argue and persuade for a truth amidst an unstable many.”181 The philosopher of science Chauncey Wright summarized the outlook when he noted that “knowledge becomes objective and scientifi c when it ceases to be associated with our fears, our respects, our aspirations—when it ceases to prompt questions as to what relates to our personal destiny, our ambitions, our moral worth.” Distinguishing between the “scientifi c mind,” which “limits itself to the truth of things, whether good or bad, agreeable or disagreeable, admirable or despicable,” and the “philosophical habit of mind,” which views and interprets nature “according to our dispositions,” Wright counseled professional historians to ignore those like Ridpath who confused the latter with the former.182 The bibliographer J. N. Larned agreed, associating Ridpath’s works with that “considerable class of popular writings from past generations which have disappeared from the bookstores, but which survive on the shelves of public libraries, where lingering echoes of an old undeserved reputation help to carry them into unwary hands.”183 The most outspoken critic of Ridpath’s approach to a socially responsible past remained George Burton Adams, who insisted that sweeping generalizers such as Ridpath were highly threatening to the profession. “Pseudo-historians” have been tempted by the “most alluring vision” that they can know “the mystery of the life of the race, of the fi nal outcome of men’s works and dominions,” Adams noted of those advocating the use of universal laws in the service of reform. Developing an elaborate military metaphor, Adams urged professionals to rally against such attacks “upon our position, systematic and concerted, and 174 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 174174 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM from various points at once.” Since the founding of the American Historical Association, he suggested, the historian “has had possession of the fi eld and has deemed it his suffi cient mission to determine what the fact was, including the immediate conditions which gave it shape.” At the turn of the century, however, the professional is now “confronted with numerous groups of aggressive and confi dent workers in the same fi eld who ask not what was the fact.” They are “little interested in that,” Adams argued, “but their constant question is what is the ultimate explanation of history, or, more modestly, what are the forces which determine human events and according to what laws do they act.” He urged historians to defend against “the threatened invasion” of those “rebel- lious disciplines” that “assailed” “our methods, our results and our ideals” and who made scholars feel as if they were “being thrown upon the defensive at many points.” Historians should protect especially against traitors like Ridpath operating within their ranks, Adams warned, betrayers who were “tempted by their enthusiasm to make . . . sweeping statements” on behalf of a “complete explanation of history,” and who conducted “hostile movements” against the profession by pursuing rearguard “lines of attack” against objectivity in magazines such as the Arena.184 G. B. Adams told members of the AHA that the kind of generalizing pursued by men like Ridpath had been tolerated too long and at too great a cost to historical schoalrship. Professionals have been inclined to “pooh-pooh this movement,” Adams noted of New History, “or to underestimate it, to call it a passing wave of thought which will soon sink to its real level and lose the relative importance which it now assumes.” In his estimation, however, this dismissive posture was a dangerous, “impossible attitude,” since popularizers had the potential to control the literary marketplace by appealing to the worst tendencies in readers. Popular historians had wild imaginations and aspirations, and their political agendas were deceptive and pernicious enough to take in the unsuspecting.185 Therefore, Adams called on all the resources of the AHA in a general attack on the reputations of these philosophers of history. He convened special committees to promote responsible collaborative histories of the United States that could compete with the generalizing works of Ridpath and others.186 He wrote pamphlets urging secondary school teachers to establish the integrity of facts (not the conjecture of universal laws) as the building blocks for their curricula in history.187 It was thankless work, he knew, but the stakes were high, since the reputation of the historical enterprise was in question. “To lay such foundations, to furnish such materials for later builders, may be a modest ambition,” Adams wrote, “but it is my fi rm belief that in our fi eld of history, for a long time to come, the man who devotes himself to such labors, who is content with this preliminary work, will make a more useful and a more John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 175

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 175175 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM permanent contribution to the fi nal science, or philosophy of history, than will he who yields to the allurements of speculation and endeavors to discover in the present stage of our knowledge the forces that control society, or to formulate the laws of their action.”188 The professional attack on popularizers such as Ridpath was not confi ned solely to the United States. The 1900 Paris World Exposition featured several historical sessions of the First International Congress of Historians devoted to the issue of the place of universal laws in history. Henri Houssaye opened the fi rst of these discussions with a comment on the obsolescence of generalizing works that purported to make sweeping sense of world history as Ridpath’s History of the World had attempted. The nineteenth century began with philosophers of history such as “Goethe, Lord Byron, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, with imagination and poetry,” and it ended with “Pasteur, Taine and Mommsen, with science and history,” Houssaye noted. In the twentieth century, however, “[w]e want nothing more to do with the approximations of hypotheses, useless systems, theories as brilliant as they are deceptive, superfl uous moralities.” What we want is “[f]acts, facts facts—which carry within themselves their lesson and their philosophy. The truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth.”189 Henry Adams, who was also in attendance at the Paris exposition, was equally dismissive of grand schemes. Writing in the third person about his “helpless” search for historical understanding at the fair, Adams noted: “He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris.” He had sought to understand “sequences,” to make important “cause and effect” connections among historical moments, but this too had proven unsatisfying. Like Ridpath, he was a victim of the relativism of expansive historical thought. “Satisfi ed that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artifi cial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force,” where he found conventionalities breaking down again. “[A]fter ten years’ pursuit” of incon- trovertible universal laws, therefore, Adams “found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”190 As Hayden White and others have noted, such campaigns against the metahistorical ambitions of philosophers of history succeeded in the end, although not, perhaps, because the arguments of scholars carried much weight with general readers but rather because universal laws proved weak frameworks on which to build stable political platforms for the development of future policies. Subscribers to the Arena seldom relied on Ridpath’s complex episte- mologies for their practical politics, and those who did were forced to admit 176 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 176176 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM that Flower’s periodical challenged ruling orthodoxies by offering alternative historical accounts that suggested the variability of modes of historical explanation. Insofar as no particular universal law (neither Ridpath’s, nor Marx’s, for example) established its authority as the single, indisputable principle for organizing events of the past or predicting those of the future, metahistorical narratives in the nineteenth century fell victim to a “conceptual anarchy” in which dozens of systems competed with each other for preeminence with no adequate method for distinguishing among them on the grounds of objectivity that historians valued so highly. “The ‘crisis of historicism’ into which historical thinking entered during the last decades of the nineteenth century,” Hayden White has noted, “was, then, little more than the perception of the impossibility of choosing, on adequate theoretical grounds, among the different ways of viewing history which these alternative interpretive strategies sanctioned.” The “virulence of the nineteenth-century professional historian’s opposition to the philosophy of history,” White added, derived from the desire of scholars to escape the “value-laden” judgments inherent in these competing modes and embedded in the political predispositions of historians such as Ridpath. Hoping to avoid the chaos of indeterminacy, professionals retreated instead to the safer ground of modest “facts” and emphasized “scholarly caution,” “empiricism,” and “moral agnosticism” as protections against “ideological impli- cation.”191 General readers followed suit, especially as the uncertainty of early twentieth-century life hinted at the inadequacy of panoptic schemes based on putative laws of history. In this sense, the growing unpopularity of popular history after 1900 was the result not only of a concerted effort on the part of professionals to discredit popularizers but also of a general skepticism about universalizing tendencies pervasive in the culture. Meanwhile, Ridpath argued persistently for a practical “scientiﬁ c” history based on universal law until his sudden death in 1900 of complications of strep throat. Reactions to his passing varied according to political outlook and historical predilection. Ridpath’s friends in the WAW were devastated. At a special session of the association, members eulogized Ridpath and his “life of earnest toil, high thought and lofty endeavor.”192 An acquaintance from Indiana, Frank L. Stanton, reminisced in the Atlanta Constitution about days spent with Riley and Ridpath back home taking “a plunge in ‘the old swim- min’ hole’ or “Visitin’ Back to Griggsby’s Station.” The same publication referred to Ridpath as “so widely and intimately known purely as a historian that his name is an American household word”; he was “America’s Foremost Living Historian.”193 Several eulogizers noted the yeoman’s work Ridpath had done on behalf of the discipline of history as well. Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of Review of Reviews, described Ridpath as not merely a “popular historian,” but

John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 177

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 177177 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3712:58:37 PMPM also “a profound thinker, a man of deep convictions, and a political and social reformer of absolute courage.”194 His close friend Riley penned a poem to commemorate Ridpath’s gifts as a poet and literary fi gure, writing: “In fancy, even now we catch the glance, / Of the rapt eye and radiant countenance, / As when his discourse, like a woodland stream, / Flowed musically on from theme to theme!”195 To Riley and others, at least, Ridpath was a “poet-historian” who had tried to change the lives of average readers with his popular art. The New York Times and the Boston Daily Globe acknowledged Ridpath’s death, but his passing went unnoticed in the professional journals of history and in the literary magazines of the day.196 The silence spoke volumes. Despite his prolifi c work and vast sales, Ridpath the metahistorian had lost ground with readers who did not always share his penchant for grand abstractions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the kind of universal outlook Ridpath promoted in large, multivolume sets was giving way to professional mono graphs, journal articles, and specialized conference papers. Even many broad-minded popularizers regarded Ridpath’s philosophical perspectives as too generalizing. Albert Beveridge, another DePauw graduate and later senator from Indiana who eventually became a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln, noted a decade and a half after the death of his former professor that Ridpath’s name had become synonymous with the speculative excesses of evolutionary theorists such as the New England metahistorian John Fiske. “What a felicity it must be to have the Fiske, Ridpath temperament which allows one to skate gracefully over thin ice and disregard such a little thing as accuracy,” Beveridge wrote.197 Beveridge’s assessment implied that Fiske and Ridpath were among the last members of a waning fraternity of philosophers of history who had lost the confi dence of readers by the turn of the century. Ironically, their reputations as popularizers could not save them from obscurity. What John Scott Wilson noted perceptively of Fiske applied as well to Ridpath, who experienced a similar descent from glory into obscurity: “He chose to ignore the academic side of history.” In response, academic historians, who came to dominate the fi eld, chose to ignore him.198

178 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 178178 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM When we consider the vast range of human interests, our histories furnish us with a sadly inadequate and misleading review of the past, and it might almost seem as if historians had joined in a conspiracy to foster a narrow and relatively unedifying conception of the true scope and intent of historical study. —James Harvey Robinson, The New History

4...... “The Past

Everything”

Edward Eggleston,

Realism, and the

Rise of the “New”

History

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 179179 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM Partial, Contingent and Incremental Truths

Challenges to universal laws by professionals raised some unsettling questions about the enterprise of history and the function of historians. In Ridpath’s Newtonian intellectual universe, historians were governed by what David Shi described as “immutable laws rather than divine commands, laws which the scientifi c method could ultimately uncover and manipulate.” This “deterministic, orderly cosmos, ticking away with the predictability of a great clock, and looking the same to every observer,” suggested that scholars had access to a “real and single past” whose historical meaning was implicit in the explicit facts unearthed by historians.1 “Postulating the past as a complex but ultimately combined or unifi ed fl ow of events organized narratively,” Robert Berkhofer Jr. has noted, allowed popular historians to presume that they could narrate the story of history as a continuum of events organized according to the structure inherent in the events themselves.2 By this logic, the best historians were those who reconstructed the past with the greatest fi delity to the facts as refl ected in the pervasive principles operating through them. The comforting thing about this system was that it gave historians an honored place in the intellectual community, conferring special signifi cance on students of “prece- dent.” George Santayana’s mantra that those failing to learn from the mistakes of the past were doomed to repeat them implied a uniformity of condition that heightened the relevance of those who treated historical experience. Empha- sizing continuity and developmental sequence, Ridpath’s scheme posed teleological challenges for historians, to be sure, but it also provided a convenient and consistent literary framework for understanding and recounting the past. Confi dence in such an orderly system, however, began to break down in the late nineteenth century in the face of modernist doubts about the possibility of an ordered universe or the likelihood of a uniform human experience. When the Viennese physicist Ernst Mach declared that “space, time, and mass had no objective existence,” he “ruptured conventional notions of a stable and uniform reality.” According to Mach, “the world consists only of sensations”; there is “no common ‘reality’ independent of human acts of perception.”3 Universalizing “cover” laws such as those posed by Ridpath were derided by Mach as “useless abstractions” and “mere rationalizations” for a world that seemed to be neat and systematic but was not.4 As one contemporary historian put it, “conditions, at least in our own time, are so rapidly altering that for the most part it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply past experience to the solution of current problems.” Frustrated by the vain attempts of Ridpath and others “to squeeze the story of the universe and man into their puny philosophic categories,” such modernist scholars argued that there were 180 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 180180 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM no stable truths, no deterministic schemes for organizing the past that made sense.5 History, they asserted, “did not unfold in linear fashion, revealing truth in the process of development over time, but rather moved through an arbitrary set of crises, disjunctures, and disruptions.”6 Ironically, part of this modernist skepticism was born of the scientifi c method in which the young Ridpath and others had put such faith. “[T]he contemporary scientifi c model of inquiry, with its demands for ceaseless and radical doubt and for verifi cation of a special kind, challenged all areas of historiography,” Ernst Breisach has noted, including “the concept of truth, how to arrive at it, and how valid it was; the perception of the forces that moved human affairs; the aim and purpose of history; the shape of historical accounts; and history’s subject matter.”7 Philosophies of history such as Ridpath’s were simply too systematic and convenient to be useful in a chaotic world dominated by complex, unstructured, and anonymous forces. In one sense these revelations presaged the “epistemological crisis” that threatened historical studies throughout the remainder of the century. They begged certain questions for which answers were not readily available.8 If the past is not part of an organized continuum from which meaningful patterns or developmental sequences can be derived, then what role can historians play in advancing the human cause or in helping those in the present to live more meaningful lives? Did the emergence of a modern sensibility, with its implicit doubts about the stability of universal structuring laws, mean an end to the relevance of history? In the face of such threatening questions, professional historians in the twentieth century adopted one of two coping strategies for maintaining a sense of the value of their work. Some conservative scholars ad- hered stubbornly to positivism, that is, to the belief that the past was singular, tangible, and knowable. As Peter Gay described the outlook, such scholars accepted the “ontological integrity” of the past as a given and attributed contradictions in the historical record to variations among the interpretations of historians regarding the details of a single past rather than to the existence of multiple or mutable pasts. “The tree in the woods of the past fell in only one way, no matter how fragmentary or contradictory the reports of its fall, no matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious historians in its future to record and debate it,” Gay noted.9 Adherents to this traditional position continued to believe that information of value could be gleaned from the past, but they did not desire to speculate on the higher laws that might inform it. The primary ambition of historians must be the modest one of stockpiling information until enough data points in any given historical sample set could be obtained to allow for reasonable assertions. Only then might limited generalizing be justifi ed. Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 181

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 181181 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM Other professional scholars, however, looked for organizing principles more acceptable to a modernist age, especially dynamic formulas capable of accounting for chaotic forces operating in a universe that seemed to defy order. Henry Adams conceded that he could fi nd no meaningful universal law or philosophy of history at work in the displays at the Paris Exposition of 1900, only a disturbing acceleration of forces that left his “historical neck” broken. For Adams, truth resided in the contemplation of force not just as a means to an historical end but as a historical end itself.10 Karl Lamprecht, considered “a pioneer of modernity” by many historiographers, agreed, arguing that historians could fi nd a useful role to play amid the “vast cosmic fl ux” by studying the processes of history rather than its mere by-products.11 For Lamprecht, “the void, created by the absence of the traditional structures of meaning [at the turn of the century], was being increasingly fi lled by views of the world as a well-nigh unfathomable manifestation of an onrushing force, vaguely referred to as Life.” Sigmund Freud called this force the “pan-erotic impulse of the ‘id’ ”; Wilhelm Dilthey proclaimed it the ubiquitous “Leben”; while Henri Bergson declared it the “elan vitales.” No matter what the name, however, scholars of this school attempted to isolate “the explanatory principle of the genuine dynamic quality of life.” For these seekers after the patterns of human consciousness, the realization gradually dawned that the only consistency in human history was its inconsistency. Understanding life, past and present, meant wrestling with the implications of the passage of time in a fl uid and irregular universe. The study of change became the historian’s primary task in this modernist conception of the past, but not change of the sort that interested Ridpath—confi rming the principles of an ordered universe operating sequentially through time—but change that was its own irreducible life force and that bore study for what it could reveal about the human condition in all its randomness. The logic of this mandate was not only compelling, it was also inescapable, since in their research historians were subject to the same capricious forces that infl uenced the lives and events they studied. “Historical accounts became glimpses at Life by observers” called historians, Ernst Breisach has noted, “who themselves were immersed in and swept along by Life’s current.”12 The dynamism of this relativistic outlook served as the philosophical underpinning for what became known at the turn of the century as the New His- tory.13 Ridpath had employed “New History” to characterize his universal law, of course, but after 1900 the term was used more often to describe approaches to the past that rejected positivistic and universalizing philosophies. James Har- vey Robinson, one of the leading representatives of this outlook, defi ned New History as a commitment to charting the psychological and sociological climate of opinion of a given epoch. Because historians often have no direct experience 182 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 182182 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM with the things they study, and because they rely so heavily on secondhand accounts produced by those who also might not have been witnesses, Robin- son noted, their sources are generally “nothing else than traces of psychological operations rather than direct traces of facts.” Accordingly, he argued, historians should study not just the facts of the past (insofar as they can be determined at all) but the process by which historical information assumed the status of facts. Robinson elaborated: “History is what we know of the past,” and we must “question it as we question our memory of our own personal acts and experiences.” The things “we recall in our own past vary continually with our moods and preoccupations,” and “[w]e adjust our recollection to our needs and aspirations, and ask from it light on the particular problems that face us.” History, then, in Robinson’s depiction, was “not fi xed and immutable, but ever changing” and was grounded in the psychological conventions of memory that adjusted themselves to change. Just as the mind selects from the “almost infi nite mass of memories” the things it needs to “overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations,” he noted, so “History, from this point of view, may be regarded as an artifi cial extension and broadening of our memories.”14 Robinson’s “New History” held out the promise that historians could refl ect meaningfully on the past if they broadened the scope of their inquiries to include insights into the human condition provided by the new social scientifi c disciplines of anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology. Robinson admired practitioners in these fi elds because they rejected the tendencies common to conservative scholars to “catalogue mere names and places” and to impose a value system on the past by privileging (arbitrarily at times) some experiences over others.15 Social scientists were engaged in the more ambitious and prodigious task of understanding the “totality” of human experience by studying the “inner life” of human beings at specifi c moments in time. “History, in the broadest sense of the word, is all that we know about everything that man has ever done, or thought, or hoped, or felt,” he wrote.16 It was comprehensive enough to include both “the rude fl int hatchets of the Chelles” and “this morning’s newspaper.”17 This signifi cant expansion of the legitimate subject matter of history represented an enormous challenge to historians, of course, given what it required of them in terms of the range and depth of their knowledge. They must be able to differentiate between the useful and the frivolous in history and must fi nd in the vast panoply of human experiences those “facts” that justifi ed their own inclusion in the restricted historical record. Citing the infl uence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1891 address “The Signifi cance of History,” Breisach notes that Robinson and other adherents to “an encompassing New History” declared themselves devoted to “the self-consciousness of humanity” and its efforts “to understand itself Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 183

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 183183 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM through the study of its past.” European historians like Jacob Burckhardt, whose groundbreaking works such as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy had introduced “kulturgeschichte” (cultural history) as a strategy for getting at the collective cultural psyche of an age, were among those who em- boldened Robinson, Turner, and other American New Historians to think that they could make social history the new orthodoxy within the discipline.18 What Charles Knight had introduced to British readers of popular historical literature in 1856 had fi nally taken root in the United States. The emergence of social history as a dominant paradigm for studying the past infl uenced profoundly what was treated by historians at the turn of the century. New Historians, for instance, appreciated in ways that their predecessors had not the “overwhelming importance of the inconspicuous, the common, and often obscure elements in the past,” including “the homely, everyday, and normal as over the rare, spectacular, and romantic, which had engaged the attention of most early writers.”19 Robinson argued that old-fashioned political histories of kings and courtiers had become obsolete, refl ecting as they did a simpleminded approach to the past. “Political history is the easiest kind of history to write,” he suggested, because it lends itself to unsophisticated “chronological arrangement” and treats mainly “events” rather than “conditions.” It was a methodology, he recognized, that “must, moreover, have seemed more important to readers when kings and courts were far more conspicuous than they now are.” Robinson recognized that “our interests are changing, and consequently the kind of questions that we ask the past to answer,” and he rejected as “vague and unreal” those old-fashioned political approaches to the past in favor of what his friend John Dewey described as the “actual condition of life, of experience . . . of what is.” Derived from a realism grounded in the principles of observation at the heart of the scientifi c method, New Historians insisted “their business is to reveal experience in its truth, its reality.”20 Some receptive historians had begun to reduce the place of “traditional facts” in their narratives and to bring them “into relation, here and there, with modern needs and demands,” Robinson noted approvingly, but, he added: “I think that this process of eliminating the old and substituting the new might be carried much farther; that our best manuals are still crowded with facts that are not worth while bringing to the attention of our boys and girls and that they still omit in large measure those things that are best worth telling.”21 Social history also affected signifi cantly how the past was presented in terms of literary style. Because Robinson, Dewey, and others anticipated a time when “philosophers may get into as close contact as realist novelists with the facts of life,” they borrowed liberally from conventions of literary realism.22 First and foremost this meant a reduction in the conventional role of “plot” in their

184 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 184184 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM histories. Most political histories of the sort New Historians rejected were heavily reliant on story lines that were linear in structure and that followed the development of ideas or institutions through a series of stages of growth or decay over time. The moral lessons implied by this panoptic approach to the past were predetermined by standards related to the presumption of “absolute truth.” Realist novelists, however, devalued these kinds of sequential narratives in favor of a “climate-of-opinion” model in which the author’s primary responsibility was to lend insight into the amorphous spirit of an age.23 The goal was “not so much a story as a ‘moment’ in the Hegelian sense, in which the course of history is stopped to capture its essence.”24 Less synchronic than diachronic, such an approach attempted to capture the intellectual temper of the times in a manner not unlike those novels of Henry James in which the plot was subordinate to the interior, psychological drama of the protagonists’ experiences. As Theodore Zeldin has argued, New Historians borrowed effectively from the structural techniques of literary pointilists, “breaking down the phenomena of history into the smallest, most elementary units—the individual actors in history—and then connecting those units by means of ‘juxtapositions’ rather than causes.”25 While New Historians were skeptical of absolute truth, they were committed to fi nding “partial, contingent, incremental truths.”26 The key to effective historical writing for New Historians, then, was to fi nd ways to use the arts of observation and detail perfected by realist novelists to recreate the conditions of life in bygone eras without resorting to idealizing conventions. Robinson, for one, thought New Historians could accomplish this task if their literary presentations “ ‘compete[d] with life,’ enticing from the reader a nod of recognition.” In his view, historical agents were depicted most accurately when they were “authentically human, possessed of mixed motives, confused consciences, and changing natures.” Instead of being “governed by implacable fate,” they must “confront viable options and retain a sense of agency” with their “own decisions and reactions giv[ing] shape to their lives.”27 The effort to achieve authenticity of character (as opposed to accuracy of temporal sequencing with reference to events), though diffi cult, was worth it to Robinson for what it could do to break historians of bad habits. If history could no longer be counted on to provide absolute truths, it could still sustain historians in meaningful work if they reconceived of their primary tasks as descriptive rather than analytical. The New Historian’s challenge, he concluded, was “so fascinating and so comprehensive that it will doubtless gradually absorb his whole energies and wean him in time from literature, for no poet or dramatist ever set before himself a nobler and more inspiring ideal, or one making more demands on the imagination and resources of expression, than the destiny that is becoming clearer and clearer to the historian.”28 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 185

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 185185 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3812:58:38 PMPM Weaning historians from the most traditional and dramatic forms of literary and poetic expression, however, would be no easy task given the central role of the “romantic” in nineteenth-century historiography. “It is the romance of history which attracts the half educated and secures the publisher,” Justin Winsor warned.29 Novelist-historians like Irving or poet-historians such as Bryant and Ridpath had established protocols for narrative presentation grounded fi rmly in the imaginative and the universal. New historians who wished to challenge the ways Americans conceptualized the past could only go so far in terms of advocating for their positions; they had to wait for a “cultural shift” to occur among the general population signaling the emergence of a new modernist epistemology before they could invest time and money into solidifying it. Historical scholarship was perhaps less cause than effect, then, of the modernist revolution that gradually altered the way average Americans conceived of history. Many of those historians who migrated eventually to the realist camp fi rst had to shed their own preconceptions of history as “romantic art,” and the transition was often diffi cult and painful. Most were reluctant to abandon the comforting assurances of George Bancroft that “anyone looking back into history could see which actions had conformed to the will of Providence” and to the mandates of universal law. The “eternal laws of the moral world were simple,” Bancroft believed, and required no special concessions to a “fl uid and irregular universe.”30 Robinson and other New Historians found this a naive outlook, and their challenge was to convince the American people that history, even popular history, was a more complex and nuanced enterprise than Bancroft had suggested.

“I Lean toward History”

A perfect example of the challenges facing New Historians who wished to use the unsettling conventions of literary realism as the narrative standard for historical study can be seen in the career of the Indiana novelist-turned- historian Edward Eggleston. Eggleston had much in common with his fellow Hoosier Ridpath, although their lives moved in opposite, while parallel directions. Born in 1837, Eggleston grew up in Vevay, Indiana, along the banks of the Ohio River southeast of Putnam County, where Ridpath was born three years later. Eggleston and Ridpath experienced roughly the same childhood, working on farms and attending school sporadically when money and time away from chores permitted.31 Both were precocious, perhaps Eggleston even more than Ridpath. “He could not master the art of planting corn,” an employer noted of Edward, but he “could learn to speak French without an effort.” Indeed, he studied seven foreign languages, and was an inveterate collector of books on

186 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 186186 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM all of them, especially historical works. “I had the good fortune to be born in a family in which literary acquirement was esteemed above everything else after religion,” Eggleston later wrote. He was especially fond of Jacob Abbott’s “red- backed histories,” popular juvenile volumes by the brother of the author of the best-selling Civil War history so roundly condemned by Godkin. He once “drew a copy of the Sketch Book through a broken pane in a locked bookcase” to discover that all his “impulses to a literary life were reawakened by the reading of Irving.” Interested in aesthetics as well as literature and history, Eggleston wrote an essay at the age of fourteen on “the Beautiful” for a literary contest sponsored by the Madison, Indiana, Courier. He won the contest, later referring to the prize he took home, a volume of William Cullen Bryant poems, as worthy of “the greatest literary success” he ever attained.32 Eggleston’s father died when Edward was still young, and that death became a point of reference for the boy as he struggled with anxieties about what to do with his life. His diaries from this period, like Ridpath’s, were ﬁ lled with the self-scrutinizing passages of a pessimist. “Pride is my great enemy. It is the alloy in every good feeling I have,” he wrote.33 Elsewhere Eggleston chastised himself (as had Ridpath) for violations of the Sabbath, especially for a Sunday spent with politicians. “How have I spent this week?” he asked himself re- proachfully after this political dalliance. “The actions the words the thoughts of another week are irrevocably recorded against the day of judgment,” he concluded. Such soul-searching revealed a considerable religious streak in Eggleston, one in which he overindulged as a teenager. Displaying “some of the most absurd behavior a lad of twelve or thirteen ever exhibited,” according to biographer William Randel, Eggleston “set for himself a regime of the sort . . . recommended for preachers: rising at four, praying on his knees for a solid hour; other periods of prayer at speciﬁ ed times during the day; strict silence broken only for absolutely necessary statements; and a very sparse diet.”34 Religious faith often crowded out other competing interests. He had literary ambitions, for instance, and as a very young man he went so far as to collect materials for a treatise on American literature. He burned the manuscript, however, because he thought its authorship “a worldly ambition.” This struggle between spiritual and worldly aspirations created in him an intellectual tension that resurfaced in his later work as a popular historian. “Two manner of men were in me,” Eggleston recognized later, “and for the greater part of my life there has been an enduring struggle between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission. The duality survives even today,” he added in 1890, referring revealingly to the ambivalence he experienced while trying to write popular history for the masses in accordance with the higher standards of scholarly literature.35 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 187

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 187187 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM Like Ridpath, Eggleston was also groomed for college, and his stepfather purchased a scholarship for him to Indiana Asbury Institute, but poor health and concerns for his durability convinced his family to give the scholarship to his younger brother George instead.36 It is hard to know how Eggleston would have done as a classmate of Ridpath’s, but he later expressed some disdain for those with expensive college educations. “Schools and colleges—I do not say universities—are primarily for those who cannot or will not study without them,” he wrote dismissively.37 In lieu of college, Eggleston drifted restlessly from one career to another, fi rst as a school teacher, then as a minister, and then, for a brief time, as a practitioner of the “Daguerran art” and the operator of a stereopticon theater.38 In his mid-twenties he was selling books by subscription, traveling throughout the Midwest as an agent for Putnam’s publishing house in Cincinnati. Several years later (when the family had more money and he had more strength to attend college) there were renewed discussions about sending him to DePauw, but he was now too old to consider matriculation seriously, so his stepfather, who had “infl uence” at the university, “purchased” an honorary master’s degree in his name. The degree was “[a]s unexpected as it was unearned,” his biographer noted, and Eggleston accepted it without any illusions as to its worth. The certifi cate made him “the only Master of Arts selling, from door to door, subscriptions to Headley’s History of the Great Re- bellion, and hoping to average fi ve dollars a day,” he noted. Later he served as a book agent for Parson Brownlow’s Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession, an attack on the Confederacy by an East Tennessee Loyalist, which put him in direct and unfavorable competition with agents selling books such as Captain George B. Herbert’s well-received Popular History of the Civil War in America.39 Here Eggleston’s life took a signifi cant departure from Ridpath’s. While the latter was off at a midwestern college preparing for a career as a professor of history, the former became active in social causes, particularly the temperance movement. Writing in his spare time for various eastern church journals on the evils of alcohol, Eggleston moved in 1870 to New York City with his brother George to coedit a reform paper, the Independent.40 Eggleston’s transition from romantic to realist commenced in earnest during this period, in large measure because of a prolonged exposure to the stern realities of urban life. Submitting articles on grim topics such as the impoverishment of American jails and the mistreatment of the criminally insane, he underwent a personal transformation that prepared the ground for his later work as a political activist. Like Theodore Dreiser, who grew up in rural Indiana where the “very soil smacked of Ameri- can idealism and faith,” Eggleston “discarded his ‘romantic’ rural perspective” in favor of the social realism of an urban dweller.41 Like Ridpath, whose work 188 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 188188 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM on The Arena sparked a latent political sensibility, Eggleston defi ned himself increasingly as a Methodist minister-turned-editor who pursued sober social truths on behalf of reform causes. Restless since the young age of fi fteen when he fi rst left home, he associated his personal radicalization with larger pressures acting on society in general. “I rapidly changed from one social environment to another,” he admitted to an interviewer for Outlook magazine, in keeping with the turbulent, fl uid world he inhabited.42 Eggleston did not abandon himself wholly to the reform impulse, however. His magazine work provided him with an opportunity to dabble in fi ction writing which soon eclipsed nearly all of his other literary interests.43 He began serializing humorous works of fi ction for Hearth and Home family magazine in the early 1870s, including nostalgic sketches of his boyhood on the Indiana frontier.44 Perhaps best known for the local-color genre writing he produced during this active period in his life, Eggleston wrote several important novels, including the best seller Hoosier School-Master (1871), which sold ten thousand copies in its fi rst six months.45 Classifi ed as a realist because of his attention to detail and the fi delity with which he sketched the rough edges of human character, Eggleston admitted that he had little experience in writing or even reading novels and claimed no allegiance to any particular literary school.46 He confessed to being as astonished as anyone that his works were as popular as they were, since, by his own admission, he was not a gifted storyteller and his writings lacked a suffi cient plot design or narrative order to satisfy readers of romance.47 In Eggleston’s case, however, the medium was the message. The unsophisticated structure of his novels, that is, was dictated by the periodical form of publication he employed, and, a biographer has noted, “he was virtually forced to continue adding installments” being “caught up in a race with the printer, week after week, that made planning ahead barely possible.”48 De- spite the unpolished quality of his writing, then, Eggleston earned a reputation as a faithful depictor of the frontier West, and by the mid-1870s, and several serialized novels later, Eggleston was acknowledged as one of the fresh voices of a new midwestern literati, associated frequently in literary reviews with the likes of William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.49 The membership committee of the Western Association of Writers viewed him as one of their own, and, in perhaps the ultimate sign of acceptance in Eggleston’s regional universe, its leadership proffered him special invitations to attend annual meetings.50 Success in the literary marketplace brought fi nancial relief to a hardworking journalist and permitted him time to perfect his literary craft. Most critics agree that the key to Eggleston’s success as a novelist in this period was the realism of his depictions. Eggleston’s brother George claimed that the Hoosier School- Master was a triumph in the popular book market because it represented “a Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 189

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 189189 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM genuine, honest & successful attempt to refl ect a phase of the actual life of the real American people as they are (or were) and not, as a novelist would like to have them.” It was “realistic fi ction, dealing with the common people & not with ‘society’ apes & watering place women.”51 Rejecting the idea of a structure imposed from the outside by the dictates of conventional action in a novel, such as Lippard practiced, Eggleston chose to describe the “inner life” of his characters, many of whom were humble, common folk like himself. He was, in short, a “recorder of actuality” who drew his inspiration “from real characters, real scenes, and real incidents.” Bret Harte described the style accurately when he said: “It was concise and condensed, yet suggestive . . . delightfully extravagant—or a miracle of understatement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality. . . . It was directly to the point.”52 Gradually Eggleston began to emulate the naturalist techniques of French novelists, treating themes of marital infi delity and illegitimacy in experimental new works of fi ction such as Roxy (1873).53 “As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character,” wrote Wil- liam Dean Howells of this realist outlook, “so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious.”54 Eggleston’s popular fi ction and its attendant realism were tied closely to his love of history. He exhibited a keen interest in social and regional history, especially in the popular folklore and dialects of the Indiana frontier, and he spoke often of his desire to use fi ction as a tool for revealing the deep undercurrents of his region’s cultural past.55 In response to criticisms raised by the New Eng- land Transcendentalist F. B. Sanborn about this unrefi ned literary technique, Eggleston elaborated on his priorities: “I must not let your Harvard & Concord judgment swerve me from what I have set myself to do,” he wrote Sanborn. “Fiction, I take it, is a border land with poetry on one side & history on the other. I lean toward history.” Acknowledging that a “history of manners is not the highest sort of fi ction,” he nonetheless proclaimed that it is “the higher kind of history.”56 In the preface to The Mystery of Metropolisville, he elaborated on this cultural purpose by adding grandly: “I have wished to make my stories of value a contribution to the history of civilization in America.” History in Eggleston’s conception was consistent with Burckhardt’s kulturgeschichte, cultural history that treats all aspects of human “civilization”—social, artistic, intellectual, as well as constitutional and political. He believed that every historical moment had an integrity and importance independent of other moments, and that every historical event, even those judged incidental to the developmental standards of institutional historians, had historical signifi cance. 190 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 190190 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM As preparation for establishing the fi delity of his realist novels Eggleston read widely in nonfi ction prose, especially history. Almost certainly the same impulses that compelled Eggleston to record local traditions with an ethnologist’s exactitude in his novels also infl uenced his desire to “get to the factual heart” of history. Eggleston, however, had no training of any formal sort to allow him to make confi dent choices about what was historically signifi cant and what was not among the infi nite number of cultural elements he acknowledged as relevant. His years as a book agent for various historical publications doubtless aided him a bit in understanding what average readers desired from a publication, although they could not compensate much for his lack of familiarity with basic historical texts. He had read “Rollin in part, Prescott’s Mexico, ‘some’ Hume and Macaulay, and ‘some’ United States and French history,” he noted, but admitted in the same breath that: “I hardly know how or where I gained a general knowledge of history. I have read a great deal of stray literature that can never be counted.”57 It was not until he chanced on a copy of Taine’s History of Art in the Netherlands that he got his fi rst real introduction to cultural history. That work, with its detailed treatment of the realism of Dutch in- teriors and its attention to the “the homely details of living,” provided a major stimulus to Eggleston’s historical vision.58 Unlike Ridpath, who believed that natural laws at work in the universe should serve as the organizational principles used by historians for structuring past experience, Eggleston found little cohesion in the past and embraced Taine’s cultural perspective as a way of selecting among the richly textured if fragmentary and even arbitrary elements of a mercurial history. Eggleston’s increasing interest in popular history was sparked as well by a casual conversation he had at a dinner party with the eminent historian Francis Parkman concerning the monumental history of the United States by George Bancroft. Long after the event, Eggleston recalled: “Nearly twenty years ago I sat at Mr. Parkman’s table one Sunday and he remarked with that sweet candor which was characteristic: ‘I cannot read Bancroft.’ ” Startled by the admission, Eggleston responded: “Mr. Parkman, if you had not said it, I should not have dared to say so, but I cannot read Bancroft” either. Eggleston’s confession encouraged a “cultivated lady” at the table to then ask: “If you gentlemen say that, what is the ground of his great reputation?” to which they both answered simultaneously, “His great knowledge.” Bancroft “knew nearly everything a historian ought to know except cultural history,” Eggleston recorded, but as a consequence of this omission in an age of intense interest in cultural mores, “his volumes are left in undisturbed repose on those shelves where stand the books which no gentleman’s library is complete without.” Bancroft “labored long” and he “labored learnedly,” Eggleston concluded, but “he has repelled Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 191

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 191191 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM more young people from the study of history than all other infl uences in Amer- ica.”59 Further conversation convinced Parkman that Eggleston possessed the kind of historical mind that could allow him to accomplish what Bancroft had not. After all, the novelist’s extensive travel experience and his familiarity with the habits and personalities of the common man and woman in America made him a perfect candidate for producing cultural history. “You are the only man in America that can write a history of the United States,” Parkman insisted, because “you are the only man who has seen so many forms of our life.”60 If Parkman intended to convert Eggleston from novelist to the noble profession of history, a transition the New Englander himself had made successfully several decades earlier, such high praise served his purpose well. The royalties accruing from Hoosier School-Master and The Mystery of Metropolisville and other works of short fi ction allowed Eggleston to resign his position with the Independent and to move to a new home in Lake George, New York, while maintaining his residence in Madison, Indiana. Despite the lack of formal training in history, Eggleston surprised family and friends in 1879 with the announcement that he planned to abandon the writing of fi ction altogether to devote himself for the remainder of his days to a broad historical study of American social life. He notifi ed his brother that fi nancial success had altered irreversibly the course of his life’s work from the writing of realistic fi ction to the production of nonfi ction history. “I am going to write a series of volumes which together shall constitute a History of Life in the United States,” Egg- leston noted, “not a history of the United States, bear in mind, but a history of life there, the life of the people, the sources of their ideas and habits, the course of their development from the beginning.”61 Taking up Parkman’s fl attering suggestion, Eggleston formulated a plan for the execution of “a grand work” in which he would tell the story of American development throughout its formative years from the perspective of the people. He envisioned the work as a popular history—a decades-long project to sketch the “commonplace actualities of early American history,” including “the detail of food and drink of the colonists, their clothing, their farm implements and household utensils, their medical practices, their superstitions. . . . a careful preoccupation with the ways of ordinary living of the American people.”62 That Eggleston imagined himself able to move so readily from fi ction to history writing is revealing of how popular history was conceived in the late nineteenth century. Anyone with catholic tastes, modest experience in the world, and a substantial literary reputation felt qualifi ed to narrate the lessons of the American past. Temporal barriers were not really obstacles either for those displaying the power of empathy. To skeptics who wondered what authority Eggleston possessed to tell the history of America’s seventeenth-century past, 192 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 192192 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM for instance, he cited his exposure to encounters on the Indiana frontier as suffi cient background. “I have known colonial life, having been among people of different manners and dialect. I can imagine in the colonies the same collision and the same contact with Indian life,” he wrote. In defending his choice, Egg- leston recognized that his credentials for writing popular history were no less substantial than those of others such as Ridpath who were reaping the benefi ts of their labors in a rich fi eld of harvest. Fearing “that the current public interest in history would not last,” Eggleston decided to strike while the iron was hot.63 “I am ripe for it,” he told his daughter Lillie. “Everything in my life seems to have prepared me for it.”64

The Big “Bow-Wow” of Public Events

In the years following his decision to become a historian, Eggleston did a good deal of thinking about his preferred methods of historical presentation. He was not enamored of classical traditions of historical writing. “For fi ve hundred years nearly every historical writer has found it necessary to touch his cap in a preface to Herodotus and Thucydides,” Eggleston wrote. While admitting that the ancients developed important military “models of style,” Eggleston condemned them for failing to take note of the “literature, the art or the social life” of the classical world. “History must treat military affairs,” he admitted, and “[w]ar is essentially exciting”—how could bodies depicted “in violent movement” and with “[l]ife and death hang[ing] upon a hair-trigger” not be exciting? Yet depictions of military engagements were repeated by the ancients with such predictable consistency and repetition, he argued, that the subject had “become trite.” In addition, such historical preferences had had a detrimental infl uence on human behavior. An obsession with historical accounts of warfare had convinced people that they must settle “everything by the gage of battle” rather than through “the wisdom of diplomacy, the wisdom of avoidance, in short, the fi ne wisdom of arbitration, that last fruit of human experience.” Eggleston insisted on a different standard: “We cannot always cover our pages with gore,” he wrote. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is “a splendid piece of literature, but it is not a model for a modern writer.” He felt the same about the fi xations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians on things political. “Never was a falser thing said than that history is dead politics and politics living history,” Eggleston wrote.65 “History must take account of politics, as of everything else,” but it must be supplemented by the “equally important phases of social activity and interest.” Until “other elements of life” besides war and politics

Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 193

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 193193 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:3912:58:39 PMPM are treated in studies of the past, he concluded, “history will remain a poor, inadequate, ill-understood subject.”66 Eggleston favored social and cultural history and praised those historians who gave attention to the manners and the customs of the subjects they studied, including dress, eating habits, work patterns, and material culture. He admired Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, for instance, because it displayed a “keen modern interest in the little details of life” (such as the techniques for constructing fi shing vessels) and a “delightful particularity” with regard to habits of speech (especially the peculiarities of Native American dialects). Eggleston also liked the popular work of Thomas Macaulay, whose monumental fi ve-volume History of England impressed him with its eye for the details of life in “old Lon- don.” It is a “wonderful piece of history” for its “faithful use of authority,” he wrote, “so particular, so minute, so extraordinary.” Of all British popularizers, however, Eggleston preferred J. R. Green, whose reputation for treating the daily concerns of commoners commended him above all others. Admittedly, Green was not always an original “authority on facts,” Eggleston recognized, but “[n]o man can treat history for a long period, as Green did, without depending on the authority of others.” As compensation he was a “philanthropic clergyman, lover of his race to begin with,” who “gradually outgrew all his doctrinal predilec- tions,” presenting religious fi gures, great and small, with appropriate respect. “He greets the barefoot friar, the Lollard, the Puritan, and the Primitive Meth- odist with the same question,” Eggleston wrote admiringly. “He treats them all as of benefi cent origin.” Through his attention to the minute particulars of life, Green did more than most of his predecessors, in Eggleston’s estimation, to encourage an appreciation for a “true all-round history.”67 In emulation of popular historians such as Raleigh, Macaulay, and Green, Eggleston initiated his “grand scheme” of a vast new history of America by studying the obscure details of life in the seventeenth-century American colonies. He made several research trips abroad, where he uncovered important documents at the British Museum and the Public Record Offi ce in London and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.68 He also journeyed to archival collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, and the Peabody Institute as well as to scenes of historical signifi cance for early American history, such as Jamestown and Plymouth. Extensive travel of this sort was expensive, of course, and it limited considerably the amount of time he could devote to writing.69 In addition, Eggleston became obsessed with collecting and preserving primary documents, and he built an extravagant scholar’s retreat at his summer home at Lake George to accommodate his growing archive in the early 1880s. Called Owl’s Nest, this fi eld- stone library was an impressive repository for over 10,000 volumes of history 194 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 194194 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM and manuscripts that Eggleston used in his work, but it also became a fi nancial sinkhole and a distraction.70 Some friends and family urged him in the interest of completing his literary project not to be so scrupulous in his collecting and research, but he rejected such suggestions. When news reached him in Europe that popularizer John Fiske was well under way with a fi ve-volume history of America, Eggleston dismissed the project as not worthy of his standards. “It will be popular, well-written, and lacking in nothing but correctness & fullness of information,” he wrote his concerned daughter Lillie. “I know we have no public suffi ciently intellectual to justify the spending my resources on such a work as I am doing but I am compelled by internal forces to do it.”71 High standards notwithstanding, the royalties Eggleston received from his novels were not suffi cient to sustain him in his lifestyle as a historian. As with John Frost and Sydney Gay, money matters incapacitated Eggleston in signifi cant ways. “I would like to write in my own way about many things,” he confi ded privately, “but I must write as the world wishes about what the world cares for in order to win bread.”72 As a result, in the mid-1880s, Eggleston allowed himself to be distracted from his grand design by several moneymaking projects proposed by publishers anxious to associate themselves with someone of his established literary reputation. He worked sporadically on an illustrated history of the United States for use in schools that promised lucrative rewards for little work; he went on the lecture circuit to recycle speeches on a multitude of subjects for organizations like the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Atlantic Lyceum Bureau, and the Colonial Dames of the State of New York.73 The prestigious Chautauqua Institute asked him for a series of lectures on American history and a historical novel as well. With respect to the novel, the institute requested of Eggleston, “Not a dry tale with gouty foot notes (you could not write such an one) but a story about ninety thousand words, which will give the American reader a picture of later colonial times, the Revolutionary period, and which will make clear by concrete statement the principles upon which our government was founded.” Appealing to Eggleston’s ambition to be popular, the Chautauqua’s editor added: “This is a chance for you to do a great educational work for the American people, and I wish you could give this matter your immediate and thoughtful attention.”74 Eggleston excused himself from the novel, although he delivered the lectures and wrote numerous articles for literary magazines as well.75 “My present plan is to fi nish up the two installments of the history I have begun & then to write a half-length story or edit this reader—whichever will help make the pot simmer a little,” he disclosed to his wife. “Then I’ll write the other 1/3 of my history which I’ll keep in hand all the time. I don’t know that there’s any need to turn aside but I’ll feel better to have made a little monies.”76 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 195

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 195195 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM One of the many offers Eggleston accepted to keep the pot simmering during this period was from D. Appleton and Company to produce a popular history for American homes. He devoted the year 1887–1888 to this single- volume history that was eventually published as The Household History of the United States and Its People.77 Called Eggleston’s “Popular History” in the promotional literature, its introduction explained that a “household edition” was one designed to be read by families around the hearth, especially by young men and women “who have yet to make themselves familiar with the more important features of their country’s history” as well as “older people” who will “think none the worse of [a] book that strives to make the causes and results of public events clear.” Because the work was “popular,” Eggleston did not hesitate to include “curious and picturesque details” in the narrative or “such anecdotes as lend the charm of a human and personal interest to the broader facts of the nation’s story.” He acknowledged that “history is often tiresome to the young” and that the condition was “not so much the fault of history as of a false method of writing by which one contrives to relate events without sympathy or imagination, without narrative connection or animation.” Egg- leston also argued that “[t]he attempt to master vague and general records of kiln-dried facts is certain to beget in the ordinary reader a repulsion from the study of history—one of the very most important of all studies for its widening infl uence on general culture.”78 The structure of Eggleston’s Household History revealed his concern for fi nding new methods to liberate the somewhat staid traditions of historical interpretation. Primary among his concerns was periodizing the past in accordance not with the linear sensibilities of Ridpath’s Bem Method but of a modernist age interested in cultural moments rather than causal chains. “I know of no surer way of making life tedious to the reader than the method of considering the early history of the United States as the history of thirteen petty communities and their intestine squabbles,” he wrote. After providing a brief history of the founding of each of the original settlements, therefore, Egg- leston spoke of the thirteen independent colonies emerging in the seventeenth century as a unifi ed whole, anticipating the nationalizing impulses of the Revo- lution in ways that some found ahistorical. He continued to emphasize unity in an even more unlikely context—the Civil War—which he described as a struggle among states with more in common than not. Eggleston was aware that his consolidating strategy made him vulnerable to the criticism that he was over- looking the diversity of American culture and underestimating its legacy in the divisions that intensifi ed rather than dissipated as the nation approached the Civil War. He believed, however, that Americans of the nineteenth century, “who were in some sense victims of the passions of the civil-war period,” 196 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 196196 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM were “not the best judges of questions between the participants.” Anxious “to bring about that oneness of sentiment in which lies the only hope for national union and prosperity,” he emphasized the “conciliation and the consolidation of our national life” over division and fragmentation. In addition, because he was less interested in political themes than in the cultural history of the people, he found it easier in the Household History to trace common character traits among a homogeneous culture. “The old historians,” he wrote, “took note of nobody but princes, courtiers, and generals,” emphasizing their petty political squabbles and their high-profi le differences. “But history, like everything else, has become more democratic in these modern days, and the real hero of the historian’s story to-day is the community itself.” Eggleston added: “It would be specially unfortunate if the writer on the history of a republic like ours should be so taken up with what Sir Walter Scott would call ‘the big bow-wow’ of public events as to neglect the story of the evolution of a great people.”79 To be sure, some of the Household History was rather traditional in its treatment of standard and clichéd events in American history. The popular home version of the work, for instance, was preceded by a school edition that included “questions, blackboard illustrations, geographical studies, and other apparatus for the use of teachers,” concessions made by Eggleston’s publisher, D. Appleton, to school boards that demanded the treatment of certain canon- ized themes and events.80 Eggleston employed the “sympathetic imagination” he had discussed in his preface to elucidate some of the most picturesque episodes in American history. Reiterating Gay’s doubts about the authenticity of the Pocahontas–John Smith rescue legend, for instance, Eggleston nonetheless wrote with Bryant’s appreciation for literary effect that “the story is so pretty and romantic that one does not like to disbelieve it.” In addition, Eggleston included several sensational segments in his popular history on the barbarities of Indian warfare and discussed openly the unfortunate “passion of the savages for intoxicating drink” and for the torturing of captives. Occasionally he even made allowances for standardized political history—in detailed discussions of the successions of presidents, for example—but in such cases he tried to provide quaint metaphors to enliven the narrative. These choices refl ected a vague reform agenda. The effort by political leaders to prevent settlers from spilling into the Ohio Valley was “much like making a law to regulate the tides of the sea,” he wrote, while the Embargo of 1807 caused some “hot-headed people in the Eastern States” to consider “dissolving the Union,” an action that “would have been much like cutting off one’s head to cure a toothache.” The apportioning of subjects in the fi rst several hundred pages of the Household History was rather random, but in almost all cases Eggleston made decisions about allotment of space based on strong literary and ethical preferences.81 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 197

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 197197 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM There were glimpses of originality, as well, in the narrative structure of the Household History. Like many practitioners of kulturgeschichte, Eggleston reduced the role of plot and story line in his history in favor of textured vignettes that emphasized the habits and customs of an age. Manuscript revisions made to his text suggest the level of cultural detail Eggleston desired for his histories. For instance, he remarked in a pencil notation on the draft of an early chapter that to appreciate the story of the rigors of colonial life “one must know something of the process of soap manufacture. Few children nowadays know that soap is made by boiling its ingredients.” He left himself the suggestion that “the necessary information could be inserted in a sentence or two and would inform the story, I think.” He also noted that the trade-off between traditional narrative and new social history was worth attention. “I think fewer stories with more detail and local color would be interesting,” he reminded himself.82 Eggleston displayed an ethnologist’s interest in the cultural preferences of Na- tive Americans as well, charting with respectful detail their various customs, including how they dressed, what games they played, where they farmed and hunted, and how they decorated their bodies. Eggleston took similar care in describing the social manners of American colonials, documenting the kinds of houses they built, the dishes they used, how they cooked their food, and what they drank. “The study of events is currently considered ‘history,’ ” noted one reviewer of Eggleston’s career, “but below these events lie their cause, their life of a people in its origin, development and growth. It is this deeper, less tangible, because all pervading, history that Mr. Eggleston has chosen as his fi eld.” Eggleston “gives life to the past,” he continued, “Erudite, he is never dry; forced, after the lapse of two centuries, to reconstitute from meagre fragments one connected, whole, he never confounds testimony with evidence, nor allows his imagination to obscure his logic. He is a scientifi c historian with an artistic method—entertaining, informing, interesting, and reliable.”83 Sometimes the integration of new and old techniques proved unwieldy for Eggleston. On many occasions throughout the Household History, the perspective of the narrator is external to the action, Eggleston choosing to describe traditional events with reference to larger national and international developments.84 Because he was reluctant to pass personal judgment on the causes and results of the Civil War, for instance, Eggleston’s narrative voice is nearly devoid of descriptions of that confl ict, and the story line is reduced to a rather fl at treatment of military maneuvers in various theaters of the war. Anxious to play down the negative aspects of the fratricidal struggle, Eggleston eschewed discussion of the bloody human toll of the war, concentrating instead on the unifi ed nation that emerged from its embers to play a historic part in the “advancement of civilization.” The Mexican War was removed enough historically 198 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 198198 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM to allow for a franker discussion of its divisive effects, but even here Eggleston muffl ed any forceful indictment of either party in the struggle. Acknowledging the “ignorance and prejudice prevailing” in Mexico at the time but also the “misery to innocent people” caused by the war, he concluded simply that “a collision with the Mexicans was probably inevitable.”85 Even popular historians such as George Lippard and Benson Lossing (who wrote during the war itself) had scrutinized motives more directly. In other instances, however, Eggleston penetrated “inside the culture of the community, providing wonderfully rich, thick descriptions of the daily life and development” by insinuating his narrative voice into the internal dialogue of the text as a way of enhancing the personalized quality of his cultural assessments.86 Describing the active social life of a small but important American gentry in the late eighteenth century, Eggleston reminded readers in his day that “life was less comfortable then than now.” Using contemporary American culture as a point of reference, he wrote: “Even the rich, with all their loaded tables and fi ne show, lacked some of the substantial comforts of modern life. . . . There was more drinking to excess then, and there was less refi nement in speech and manners, than there is now.”87 The alternating narrative voices emanating from the Household History gave it an uneven quality and left Eggleston with mixed feelings about its worth when it was published in 1888. On the one hand, he was proud of the fact that he had introduced some new themes and materials into the master narrative of the American past. The Great Story of the nation’s history could now be said to include straightforward, scholarly commentary on fashion, leisure activities, commerce, functional art, and cooking in ways that the works by popularizers such as Irving, Bryant, Gay, and Ridpath had not. This was a legacy of Eggleston’s interests in literary realism as was his tendency to avoid usurping narrative. “What had been catalogued by some critics of Eggleston’s fi ction as a fl aw—his inability to invent—was now an important virtue,” according to his biographer. “His boyhood literalness found its full outlet in his history, although interpretation of the facts and their judicious massing to convey a forceful picture called for his most mature judgment and cumulative skill in writing.”88 Reviewers added that the Household History was a model of New History insofar as it made history palpable. “A careful reading of its pages leads to the conclusion that the author has collected, assorted, arranged, and presented the fact of the history of our country so as to form a most interesting narrative,” noted one reader. The “value of the volume turns on its power to affect the mind, and make its facts real, its people real, its scenes real.”89 On the other hand, Eggleston worried that the volume was too cursory in its handling of cultural themes, too hurried in its overall presentation to constitute a serious contribution to scholarship. There were also challenges

Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 199

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 199199 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM posed by Eggleston’s research that he found he could not address adequately in a popular format. In writing the Household History, Eggleston discovered that the “historical record, unfortunately . . . , is notoriously inadequate, full of gaps and fl aws, infuriatingly lacking in the missing links we are always seeking.” As Gertruade Himmelfarb notes, New Historians like Eggleston were affected especially by these lapses because they were reliant on “subjects that, by defi nition, produce few such records”; the “states of mind” of the “inarticu- late masses” that were “too subtle and private to lend themselves to the kind of evidence that survives the ages.”90 Eggleston was frustrated as well by aspects of the book’s production that he could not control adequately. The required pace of writing was not to his liking, for instance. Similarly frustrated as Gay was in dealing with the impatient Scribner, Eggleston informed his publisher that “1,000 words a day is all any writer can produce who has any regard to style, even when materials are not to be sought for.” When Appleton proposed providing a series of literary associates to help out with the projects such as Gay had been required to accept by Scribner, Eggleston replied curtly that the kind of history he desired to write “could hardly be turned out in that time even with a force of assistants.”91 In terms of production history, the Household History shared much with many of its competitors, the demands of the marketplace as recognized and attended to by publishers confl icting directly with the desires for thoroughness and accuracy as insisted on by authors. An example of the diffi culties Eggleston faced in the book’s production is found in its illustration program. Appleton promised Eggleston that he would make it a priority to create a visually stimulating product, and to that end the publisher employed a large number of talented engravers and illustrators to give graphic character to the work. These artists were commissioned not only to depict traditional historical scenes (such as Civil War battles) but also costumes, armor, inventions, implements, sea and river craft, vehicles, and the cultural manners of the American people. In the introduction, Eggleston noted that “the drawings have been mostly made under the supervision of the writer, and have required no less thought and care than the text itself.”92 Among those artists Eggleston supervised was Frederic Remington, an illustrator who had gained a national reputation for depicting with realism the customs and manners of the people of the West.93 That Appleton was able to secure the services of Remington was a bit of a coup in its own right, since Remington was perhaps America’s busiest illustrator, working for numerous magazines and illustrated book publishers. “Fred has as fi rm grip on Harpers & The Century as any artist in this country,” his wife Eva Remington wrote. “He has all he can do.” In 1888, the year the Household History was published, Remington produced 139 illustrations for periodicals alone, and his commissions for publishing houses 200 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 200200 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM such as Appleton’s, which often called for original pieces of art that did not repeat images already widely circulating in magazines, increased the work- load substantially. Consequently, Remington’s services came at a price—literal and fi gurative. At work on seven illustrated books at the same time, the artist sketched too hurriedly for the Household History and without much evident commitment to the project. In the end, he blamed the poor quality of his illustrations for Eggleston’s work on the mistranslation of images by incompetent engravers he referred to as “blacksmiths-turned-woodchoppers.”94 Remington was not the only one critical of the pictorial representations in the Household History. Others complained that the illustrations were inaccurate and unhistorical, certainly a drawback for a book that Eggleston hoped would be recognized for its realistic detail and accuracy. A blistering editorialist in the Florida Times-Union wrote a review that devastated Eggleston: “In the plain truth we fi nd lots of errors of language; facts distorted, and even at a superfi cial examination the illustrations are, to say the least, left-handed abortions. In the fi rst full page picture, while the Santa Maria of Columbus is running dead before the wind under the mainsail and crossjack, the Pinta is hove-to under the sprit sail—a thing she could not do; and the Nina is only an open jolly boat sailing towards the Santa Maria right in the teeth of the wind, as if she was a steamer without any canvas.” In addition, the reviewer argued that illustrations of a “Scotchman” were inappropriate on several counts. First, the reviewer noted, “there is no such word neither in the Scottish nor English language as a Scotchman,” and second, “as for the dresses, I have seen pictures of the Scottish people dating back hundreds of years, but I never saw any like these.” A piper of a Highland regiment was depicted with his bagpipe under his right arm, “when it is always played with the left,” while he carried a fl ag with a St. George cross on it in ignorance of the history of that pennant. “[J]ust think of a Highlander fl ying the St. George cross!” the reviewer asserted with exasperation. “No one ever saw or heard tell of it.”95 These remarks echo the sentiments of a writer for the Dial who asked: “Has not the time come to demand that the pictures introduced into works on social and cultural conditions be subjected to the same investigation which is given to other testimony?”96 Despite these inadequacies, the Household History did very well in the marketplace; in fact, to Eggleston’s surprise, it yielded more money than any of his other literary projects including his best-selling fi ction. Those who purchased the book were most impressed by its literary “genius,” its commitment to realism, and its timeliness. “Ten years ago such a book would have met with a cold reception,” noted a reviewer for the Literary News, “but a new day is upon us” when those “who understand some of the psychological laws of childhood” will put such a volume “to good use.” The problem of “producing a book Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 201

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 201201 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM “The Ships of Columbus” by Allegra Eggleston from Edward Eggleston’s Household History of the United States and Its People.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 202202 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4012:58:40 PMPM on history that will attract and hold the attention, and carve its facts into the memory . . . seems to have been fairly solved,” the reviewer offered.97 While the ﬁ nancial success of the project also freed Eggleston to complete his epic “new social history”—that “larger work yet far from ready for publication”—it created some unexpected obligations that delayed still further his work on the “grand design.”98 From the moment Eggleston’s popular history attained prominence, its publisher hounded the author for updated editions. Appleton wished to issue a special quadri-centennial edition of the work, for instance, as a way of competing with Ridpath’s People’s History of the United States and other texts, an assignment that required Eggleston to rethink his chapters on Columbus and the age of exploration.99 “I am greatly demoralized just now by the jeopardy into which this repeated schoolbook corporation puts my interest in my histories,” Eggleston wrote with reference to his languishing magnum opus.100 The Household History garnered him dozens of other offers to produce smaller popular histories, and the prospect of “easy money” tempted him greatly. With considerable anxiety he posed an important question to himself in his personal diary for 1889: “Now whether to return to my work in Social History or to pursue ﬁ rst certain more lucrative enterprises so as to win a competence is the question.”101 These more “lucrative enterprises” won out in the short run. Some were offers Eggleston felt he could not refuse, like Appleton’s suggestion that he produce in conjunction with his two daughters—Lillie a writer of children’s literature and Allegra an illustrator—a series of biographies of famous Ameri- cans for young people. Anxious to encourage his daughters’ careers, Eggleston accepted Appleton’s offer for biographies of Columbus, Washington, and Pocahontas, securing a hefty “20% royalty on all copies sold and an advance for the preliminary work required.”102 At the same time, Eggleston negotiated a separate contract with the American Book Company on behalf of his wife, Frances Goode, who produced a series of school readers under the title Sto- ries of Great Americans for Little Americans. He spent the summers editing drafts of his wife’s stories, pitched to second-grade readers, with juvenile titles such as How Audubon Came to Know About Birds and Some Boys Who Became Authors—Bryant, Hawthorne, Prescott, Holmes. Allegra and Frederick Rem- ington were once again hired to illustrate these readers while Eggleston was kept busy as general editor and consultant to the art department.103 These family projects were ideal in one sense, because they drew Eggleston closer to the circle of loved ones he found essential to his success as a writer. But they soon created problems and distractions for the popular historian as well. For one thing, the art department at Appleton’s was highly scrutinizing of Allegra Eggleston’s drawings. One member of the production staff took issue Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 203

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 203203 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM with her depiction of a grizzly bear, which not only did not “look like a grizzly bear,” in his estimation, but was shown climbing a tree, which he claimed such bears could not do. “Now it was only Saturday afternoon that I read an article in the ‘Evening Post,’ written by a grizzly bear hunter of the Pacifi c Coast, in which he distinctly states that the grizzly bear cannot climb a tree,” the staff member wrote Eggleston, adding: “Unless you are very sure of your ground, I think it would be well to look into this point.”104 Illustrators at Appleton’s also found it diffi cult to reproduce Allegra’s drawings for the Stories of Great Americans series, since she did not tend to sketch with the engraver’s needs in mind. “I think it would be a very great help to us in the next book on Wash- ington, if your daughter would look over the illustrations and see which have been the most successful from a printing point of view,” W. W. Appleton wrote Eggleston. “If in the Washington, the illustrations were more open and the lines more clear, with less very heavy blacks, we could print them more readily and use a somewhat cheaper paper.”105 The need to use cheaper paper was based on the fact that the books were also proving expense to produce. A high price per volume meant almost certain failure in the popular book market, and Appleton’s scrambled to fi nd ways to reduce costs. “We have had a talk with your father about the matter and as we have told him, it does not seem to us that any one is to blame, as the literary and artistic portions of the work have been highly commended, as well as the manufacturing of the book,” the publisher wrote Lillie Eggleston directly. “We think, however, that in our anxiety to make a beautiful book, we have put altogether too much expense in the manufacture and hence have been obliged to ask a much higher price than the public require.”106 Even “Reading Circles” for whom the books were intended could not afford the series, Appleton noted, and he was forced into the embarrassing situation of having to ask the Egglestons to take a cut in their robust 20 percent royalty. “It is a very great disappointment to us that the books have not done better, and we are still afraid that quite a number of them may be returned, and we are naturally doubtful of the outlook for the present season,” Appleton wrote apologetically in making the request.107 Other problems with illustrators delayed these historical projects further. Frederic Remington, who had been commissioned to do spot illustrations for a number of the popular works by Eggleston and his daughters, proved dis- turbingly “indefi nite” about when his pictorial representations would be available.108 Additionally, his fees were too expensive for publishing initiatives that were already well over budget. “He always wants a hundred dollars apiece for his drawings, irrespective of size,” Appleton’s editor Richard Hinman wrote with distress to Eggleston. “I explained to him that not only was our page size much smaller than that of the Century, but that we could seldom use more 204 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 204204 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM than a very small fraction of our page for an illustration, and in consequence we felt that a hundred dollars was a very high price to pay for a drawing that had to be so greatly reduced.” When Remington still refused to work for any less than a hundred dollars an image, Hinman wrote Eggleston in despair: “I consequently told him that it was possible you had a few pictures you felt he could do better than any one else and I would ask you to give those to him, but any that you felt were not speciﬁ cally adapted to his pencil I would have to ask you to place elsewhere.”109 This farming out of illustrations originally intended for Remington proved disastrous to the project, since the new pictures by less experienced artists were clearly inadequate. “I wish we had given the ‘Boone and Calloway’ to Remington,” Hinman wrote late in the production of the work, “or that we could arrange in some way to do so still. The Wiles drawing of Boone is certainly unsatisfactory as it stands, and I think should not be used. As it is Wiles’ second attempt, I am afraid he cannot better it very much, though if he says he can do so, I suppose we shall have to let him try.”110 These efforts on the part of publisher and authors to save money in the production phases of these popular works proved counterproductive to their chances of success in the literary marketplace. So frustrated was Eggleston with the whole business of trying to illustrate popular volumes adequately that in 1893 he turned down an invitation to write an introduction to John Clark Ridpath’s Art and Artists of all Nations, despite the strong incentive of a $200 to $250 stipend for a short preface and a promise from the publisher that “our projected book will have a very large sale, and will be by far the best of all the art books published, at a moderate price, and designed for the homes of the medium class of American people.”111 Nor did Eggleston act on the numerous offers made by Ridpath and the Western As- sociation of Writers to join them in their annual caucuses in Warsaw, Indiana. Eggleston’s rejection of these offers to work closely with his fellow Hoosier historian was not personal; it merely suggested the complex counterdirections of the career paths of two men who wished to be popularizers and scholars simultaneously. Having completed his highly speculative Universal History, Ridpath was now in search of smaller projects and more restricted historical arenas in which to demonstrate the applied potential of his grand theories. Eggleston, however, was looking to expand his vision outward, extrapolating from the modest, popular publishing efforts of his midcareer to his long deferred plan to write a “new social history” of America. Appleton urged him forward in this latter ambition to complete his magnum opus, dangling before Eggleston the prospect of a contract for ﬁ ve volumes with an expected sale of one hundred thousand copies per volume. “Should . . . your copyright be say 50 [cents] per copy,” the publisher wrote enticingly, “this would amount to Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 205

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 205205 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM $250,000. Of course, we cannot absolutely promise to do as well as this, but this is certainly the way it looks to me now.” For a popular writer as concerned with money and reputation as Eggleston, this prospect was compelling indeed. Finding “time,” he acknowledged, was the only real obstacle he faced in realizing his and his publisher’s dream.112

Neither a Plodding Gleaner nor a Merely Pleasant Narrator

Eggleston’s progress on his “grand work” was excruciatingly slow, owing in part to personal idiosyncrasies but even more to his commitment to thorough and scholarly methodologies of investigation. Working in a painstakingly comprehensive fashion, Eggleston researched with care the origins of every seventeenth -century colony, taking nearly four years to master the relevant sources for the period up to 1650 alone. He was a stickler for detail and trusted no one’s authority. “With his lack of formal training in history he felt he could never rely on what any other historian, however trustworthy, had written,” noted William Randel. “[I]nstead, he imposed upon himself the formidable duty of tracing every fact back to its origin,” and this obsession for confi rming every “obscure detail” and detailing the process of substantiation in “Elucidations” at the end of each of his chapters affected profoundly the publication schedule for the work.113 In letters to his family, he complained of the arduous task he had set for himself. “New Eng. history & all colonial history is a horrible labyrinth,” he wrote Lillie in January 1881, speculating that he might not complete his research on the Massachusetts Bay colony “in the course of ten or fi fteen years of work.”114 Sadly, that prediction proved just about right. Haunted by premoni- tions of illness and even death, Eggleston worried that the more heavily he was invested in the project, the less chance he had of fi nishing it. “As year after year was consumed in the toilsome preparation,” he wrote, “the magnitude of the task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so felicitously expressed by Raleigh, ‘that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me before the performance.’ ”115 As a hedge against the failure to complete his project, Eggleston released advanced drafts of many chapters to periodicals such as The Century. Fourteen long years after he had proposed to devote himself “exclusively” to the project, the fi rst book in the series was published as an independent volume by D. Appleton.116 These delays refl ected personal circumstances unique to Eggleston, to be sure, but they also signaled something about persistent conceptual problems at the heart of New History as an enterprise. In the fi rst place, New Historians like Eggleston were too ambitious in their desires to be inclusive to allow for rapid

206 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 206206 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM publication of their works. Crane Brinton referred contemptuously to New His- tory as “the past everything,” and his comment underscored the hopelessly diffi cult task of comprehensiveness that New Historians set for themselves.117 The commitment of literary realists like Eggleston to “all of life” excited historians, Ernst Breisach has noted, but it also “well-nigh crushed them under the weight of its obligation to fi nd, explain, order, and relate a myriad of phenomena. With the traditional guarantors of continuity and meaning declared to be illegitimate in a scientifi c age, with the narrative political history of events and persons found to be inappropriate, and the mass of data multiplying rapidly, the task of synthesis became exceedingly complex.”118 The burden was not unlike trying to write the Great American Novel. It took a certain Melvillian hubris on the part of historians to assume that they could capture every aspect of “this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it,” the novelist John W. De Forest wrote. The extreme mutability of American life at the turn of the century suggested that historians “pursued an impossible task in trying to give faithful representation to a nation whose strange medley of humanity seemed in a state of perpetual motion.”119 In the second place, the need to place practical limits on inclusiveness raised related concerns as to the principles of selection that should be used to determine what to exclude as irrelevant or extraneous in the story of the past. Given the equal footing of all historical facts in the New History scheme, how was one to decide which were the fi rst facts among equals? Presuming that few historians took the philosophically absurd position that “everything” about the past could or should be told, and keeping in mind the limitations of space and time to which publishers and historians were forced to pay heed, New Historians were obligated to select between things to record and things to ignore, and these choices refl ected distinct ideological points of view. In studying seventeenth-century foodways in Massachusetts rather than the clothing of slaves in Georgia, for instance, Eggleston exercised a conceptual choice that refl ected regional and perhaps even racial priorities. Sometimes, of course, a lack of suitable sources helped direct these decisions. New Historians might desire to write a “history of everything” associated with the material culture of seventeenth-century commoners in Delaware, but a paucity of reliable sources could stymie that ambition. “[N]o amount of research is likely to make our knowledge very clear or certain regarding the condition of the people at large during the fi ve or six centuries following the barbarian invasions,” James Har- vey Robinson noted of a similar dilemma in European history. “It rarely occurred to a medieval chronicler to describe the familiar things about him, such Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 207

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 207207 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM as the way in which the peasant lived and tilled his land.”120 The lack of reliable historical materials undercut the New Historians’ mission to tell comprehensive stories that went beyond traditional political and military narratives. In the third place, New Historians shared in common with the literary realists they emulated an ironic propensity for the reintroduction of subjectivity into the historical formula. Realist novelists were committed to re-creating life transparently, without the mediating presence of the author, and they took pride in avoiding the idealizing general laws and usurping philosophies of history. As Robert Berkhofer Jr. has pointed out, however, “[e]ven a denial of meaning to the course of history is, of course, a philosophy about the meaning of history,” and the realist approach had at its anti-philosophical core a reliance on organizing principles that suggested an implied philosophy of history.121 At the heart of literary realism and the New History, for instance, was a belief that reality “resided not so much in the thing depicted as in the thing felt.” Indeed, Eggleston understood that the “reality” of the past is always a moving target, dependent as it is on what the historian values at any moment in terms of the “inner life of visible facts.”122 Realists assumed that they could chart with fi delity the “inner world” of historical subjects by distinguishing between “life as is” and “life as perceived,” but such a distinction required the reintroduction of a nearly omniscient mediator who could judge the value of amorphous attitudes and feelings across multiple time periods. How was one to determine with exactitude the precise manner in which a historical episode was received by a people or what a complex “psychology of an age” might mean to all subjects of a realm? And what about the subjectivity implicit in the role of historian as observer? These concerns increased the likelihood that New Historians such as Egg- leston could be guilty of the sin of “ ‘false consciousness,’ that is, the practice of indicting historical fi gures for not understanding their own reality.” Instead of “respecting the actions and professed beliefs of contemporaries,” Gertrude Himmelfarb has written, committers of this sin presume to “expose the real impulses that lay behind those actions and the real feelings that conditioned those beliefs.”123 This essentially speculative enterprise constitutes an abandoning of the factual basis of history in favor of novelistic suppositions. “When a novelist submitted to me a piece of history which he had been writing, and I pointed out its errors of statement,” the historian Justin Winsor noted of the tendency, this writer of fi ction scorned what he called “the stern brutality of facts.” Elusive and unwieldy, “facts” were, nonetheless, the mainstay of historical writing, Winsor insisted. Ignoring similar advice, another historian acquaintance “went for comfort to a brother philosopher, who told him to stick to his philosophy and leave out his facts.” Winsor had little time for such “men who hate facts.”124 208 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 208208 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM The disturbing implications of these philosophical issues notwithstanding, New Historians pushed forward with their realist agenda. Throughout the 1880s, Eggleston serialized his “grand work” until it gradually gained suffi cient bulk to constitute a fi rst volume in the projected series. The Beginners of a Nation, published in 1896, was previewed in a ten-page prepublication review by William P. Trent in Forum magazine, circulated widely by Apple- ton’s. Trent noted with some irritability that “we have been made to wait an unaccountably long time for the fi rst permanent fruits” of Eggleston’s labor, but he added quickly that the wait was worth it, as the historian had produced a “noble” volume that augured well for the remaining works. Trent claimed that Eggleston was “neither a plodding gleaner nor a merely pleasant narrator of what we all know” but a “true historian” who had “not only made an excellent contribution to culture-history” but who had “reached a vantage-ground of broad and free observation which few of his predecessors have so much as discerned, and which subsequent historians must strive to attain if they have any consideration of their fame.”125 This observational vantage point was voy- euristic in a sense, since, as Eggleston admitted, “it is only by ingenious eaves- dropping and peeps through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge of the past.” The justifi cation for such an approach to the past, he argued, was the desire to emphasize “the life and character of the people” in an effort to “make the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time.”126 The Beginners of a Nation was not a radically new enterprise; it shared some things with the popular histories written by other novelists-, journalists, and poets-turned-historians. Like Sydney Howard Gay, for instance, Egg- leston rejected the “diluvian piety” with which many historians had depicted the early settlers, and he was not afraid to pass negative judgment on former heroes where he deemed it necessary. “The founders of the little settlements that had the unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have not been able to treat otherwise than unreverently,” he wrote, warning: “Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply English men and women of the seventeenth century, with the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age.”127 Eggleston also learned from the mistakes of his predecessors, choosing not to engage in Gay’s or Ridpath’s polemics. In the advertising circular, for instance, Trent applauded Eggleston’s decision not to include “a ponderous brief for or against Captain John Smith’s veracity in the Pocahontas incident,” noting of the Household History that some years ago the historian had been “unwary enough to publish a plea on Smith’s behalf” whereas in the present volume he refrained wisely from vouching “for the literal trustworthiness of each detail of the Pocahontas story.” Eggleston now rejected this “walking backwards to throw a mantle over the nakedness of ancestors” and refused to add “another Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 209

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 209209 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM circlet of light to the halo fast thickening around the heads of New England’s worthy settlers.” If at times he had to treat the colonists “unreverently” in The Beginners of a Nation, he did so to underscore the realist position that such historical fi gures were just simple people, too, and to suggest that the gap between them and his readers was less substantial than they might think.128 Some readers worried that Eggleston might prove too much of an iconoclast and expressed concern for what his debunking book implied about the sanctity of the national narrative. One reviewer evinced “a certain dread” of this intellectual tendency, noting in a manner reminiscent of Bryant’s comments about Gay that the “cold and rigid processes of history” characteristic of Eggleston’s prose would “make sad work of many traditions, overturn the most cherished fi gures of fancy and reduce not a few whom we had fashioned in heroic mold to images of every common clay.”129 Another objected to his “barren, negative, fault-fi nding harping on the minor points, accidents and non-essentials of the history which no respectable historian has been guilty of for fi fty years or more, and which we hoped was now forever impossible.”130 Individual critics also lined up to defend their favorites among the historical fi gures Eggleston debunked, including Richard Hakluyt, who was condemned in The Beginners as part visionary, part “crank”; Roger Williams, who was depicted as noble but prone to reckless behavior; Thomas Hooker, who was “virile” but too “formal”; and, Anne Hutchinson, who was persuasive but brash.131 Finally others condemned Eggleston for presuming to know when leaders were acting against the best interests of their own age or even against their own self-interests. John Endecott, the Salem leader of “rash temper and impulsive enthusiasm,” refused to recognize when his struggle for religious freedom had been won and “went on fi ghting the Lord’s battles against the Apollyons of his fancy, regardless of the results,” Eggleston had written. “A strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry,” Eggleston concluded, Endecott’s misreading of his own situation “supplied the condiment of humor to a very serious history—it is perhaps the principal debt posterity owes him.”132 Many other readers, however, appreciated and applauded Eggleston’s irreverent tone, fi nding in it the elements of a refreshingly new cultural critique. Some of those raised on standardized political and institutional histories had grown weary of what Himmelfarb refers to as the “rational, conscious, deliberate” attempts by historians “to organize public life so as to promote the public weal and the good life.” They were intrigued, instead, by the potential place of the irrational and profane in historical accounts. Hence, students of New History such as Eggleston favored psychoanalyzing the motives and behaviors of colonists over chronicling the “refl ection and judgment” of their political 210 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 210210 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4112:58:41 PMPM decisions. If at times this meant demoting the role of “mundane, pragmatic reason” in history or of minimizing the place of “laws, constitutions, and political institutions,” so be it.133 A reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle described Egg- leston’s modernist style as “crisp, pungent, idiomatic, and withal graceful” and observed “that subjecting the Puritans to ordinary criticism would, not many years before, have seemed a profanation” as it had to Bryant.134 Others praised Eggleston’s willingness to use the new social science of psychology to expose the neuroses, psychoses, and pathological behaviors of signifi cant historical fi g- ures. “The book is written in a brilliant, sententious style, and contains some admirable characterizations of personalities,” he concluded admiringly.135 The literary quality of The Beginners of a Nation was consistent with the realist tradition Eggleston had helped to defi ne when he was a writer of fi ction. “[H]is novelist’s interest in character and motive conditioned him to view the early settlers not as pegs on a board but as living beings responding to stimuli and sharing normal emotional reactions,” his biographer noted.136 Hence, early settlers in America were classifi ed by Eggleston according to a typology of feeling-states. Colonizers of Cape Ann, Massachusetts were “speculative” dreamers who tried to grow maize in the summer and to operate fi shing expe- ditions in the winter only to discover that “this plausible scheme proved a case of seeking strawberries in the sea and red herrings in the woods.” Farmers were “but lubbers at codfi shing, and salt-water fi shermen were clumsy enough in the cornfi eld.” Catholic settlers of Maryland were “tender” adherents to a faith that provided a “relief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksomeness of the bigotries of the age.” And the Virginians at Jamestown were “sorrow[ful]” and “forlorn” adventurers who experienced “a procession of motives” in their rationalizations for migration to the New World. No one in the colonies operated from a position of psychological disinterest in Eggleston’s work, not even the rodents. The “delusional” King James hoped to convince settlers at James- town to produce silk from royal worms, which they succeeded in doing after a fashion, Eggleston wrote. “[B]efore the colony was nine years old it was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its market value,” he noted, while “the rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility of the failure.”137 Such psychological projections, as one reader characterized the tendency, constituted a style “far superior” to anything of its kind. “The author has put ancestor worship, sectionalism and partisanship beneath his feet,” he concluded, making Eggleston’s “treatment of men and events realistic. He has striven to know and to depict men as they were.”138 Readers also appreciated Eggleston’s efforts to establish the legitimacy of New History as a historical methodology, earning him “the praise and gratitude

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 211211 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM of all who are interested in the development of the art of historical composition, of all who wish to see a fresh spirit and fresh methods applied to the writing of American history.”139 Complaining of the “long list of literary crimes committed by idealistic historians,” Reuben Briggs Davenport of the York Commercial Advertiser declared The Beginners of a Nation the perfect product of the “naturalist school” where “information” ruled over “sentiment.” Eggleston was “no idealist,” Davenport argued, since he was “not writing to set forth stirring tales of daring men, but to tell the truth as nearly as may be, admitting faults as well as noting virtues, sparing nothing that the whole truth be made known.”140 George Eggleston had confi rmed the aptness of this characterization when he noted in a review of the book titled “Historians and Our Aristocrats” that his brother had nearly realized the dream of professionals for an objective past, but he had done so in a manner many traditional scholars found unacceptable. “If the historians go on as they are now doing there is going to be trouble,” George wrote tongue in cheek. “They have caught the pestiferous ‘scientifi c spirit.’ They not only search out facts with the callous indifference of an expert accountant looking for false entries in some errant cashier’s books, but they have latterly begun to insist upon truth-telling itself as a positive virtue.” Edward Eggleston was not merely content to “relate uncomfortable facts without gloss or disguise,” his brother argued, he also insisted “upon interpreting the facts without romance or patriotism, or loyalty to the ‘forefathers’ or respect for the descendants of the forefathers, or any other of those saving perversions which have laid the secure foundations of American aristocracy.” Should Edward “go on,” he noted playfully, “it must presently appear that proof of descent from any of these early settlers, so far from being a patent of nobility, is in fact a demonstration of thoroughly plebeian order.”141 Another groundbreaking aspect of Eggleston’s work was its recognition of the European roots of American colonial development. Scholars such as George Beer were especially excited about this quality of the work, since Eggleston was one of the fi rst to promote Beer’s “imperial thesis” by which American colonial development was viewed more as a derivative of Euro- pean cultural life than as an original product of an indigenous, native environment.142 According to this school of thought, colonial eating habits were adaptations of European foodways, patterns that when stubbornly embraced by the implacable fi rst settlers came close to starving them in a land of plenty. American slavery was not an indigenous domestic institution in the South, but an imported one with ties to the lingering vestiges of European feudal- ism. Such scholarly insights were enhanced by the marginalia in the volume which provided running commentaries on interconnected ideas and also by the “Elucidations” at the end of each chapter which referenced additional 212 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 212212 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM sources in both European and American scholarship. The tone of these scholarly notes was clearly revisionist, Eggleston using them as an instrument to discredit those who had succumbed to the seduction of belief in home- grown or domestic sources of colonial development. “The trouble is that we have been wrongly educated,” recognized the Rochester Post-Express of Eggleston’s scholarly accomplishment. “Our historical instruction has been along the lines of idealization,” when, in fact, a more effi cacious plan would be to recruit “[m]ore men like Eggleston . . . to dispel the glamor that had long hidden the truth.”143 Finally, The Beginners of a Nation was noteworthy for its purposeful exclusion of many of the most ostentatious marketing features of the standard popular histories in reaction to which it was written. Published in a dull, brownish-beige veneer, the book was unillustrated and made little attempt at visual stimulation. Eggleston’s frustrations with his earlier illustrated texts as well as Appleton’s interest in reducing the costs of the projected multiple- volume series doubtless contributed in part to the decision to reject a pictorial format. “Your history in its present form is I fear out of our reach because of its illustrations and its cost,” editor John Vincent had informed him with reference to an earlier proposal.144 Cost was not the only consideration, however. In abandoning illustrations, Eggleston demonstrated as well just how far he had moved in his self-identifi cation from a popular to a professional historian. The American Historical Association had already initiated a plan of attack against the excessive use of pictorial material in so-called scholarly histories, and Eggleston endorsed in practice its policy that illustrations were a distraction to the more restrained intentions of professional scholarship.145 Eggleston knew his acquiescence in the anti-pictorial campaign would cost him some readers outside the profession who disapproved of the decision. “There are no illustrations,” a reviewer complained of the volumes in Eggleston’s His- tory of American Life series, “which is surprising in this age, and it seems to me regrettable; there ought surely to be pictures of old things and customs which would have shed additional light upon the subject.”146 He was willing to endure such criticism, however, because he wished to reach not only popular readers, whom he hoped might excuse some loss of visual impact, but also scholars, who would not tolerate its presence. The volume was also without the breezy, generalizing tone of most popular histories, a literary choice that caused some readers to condemn the project out-of-hand. “To be quite frank, a fi rst glance at the book before us gives rise to a feeling of disappointment,” wrote the reviewer for the American Hebrew, who complained that “Dr. Eggleston is much more conservative in mode of treatment, and avoids the generalizations and summarizations” of his earlier Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 213

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 213213 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM popular works. While the journal appreciated Eggleston’s efforts “to furnish us instead with careful, closely considered studies of a much more specialized character,” it lamented the loss of universalizing strategies. The American Hebrew recognized that Eggleston abandoned the more popular format of his earlier works because he believed “broader generalizations would be apt to be unscientifi c,” but its editors speculated that in altering so profoundly the methodology of history, Eggleston might have alienated unwittingly the wider popular audiences he had always craved.147 In an otherwise generous review, the L.A. Herald agreed: “History that is without relation to philosophy is piti- fully barren and unprofi table,” its reviewers noted.148 Defenders of Eggleston reminded critics that the lack of generalizing laws in The Beginners of a Na- tion was a calculated strategy pursued in the cause of redefi ning the popular by reference to an immersion principle rather than to a transcendental or disembodied ethic. In an interview conducted with Outlook magazine shortly after publication of the volume, Eggleston claimed that his goal was to achieve authenticity by making the linkage between the newer methods of social history and those he had mastered in his realistic fi ction. Eggleston informed the readers of Outlook: “There is really no other way of writing [history] vividly and familiarly except by saturating one’s self.”149 While some popularizers regretted Eggleston’s seeming abandonment of their cause, professionals celebrated the arrival of a new convert. Eggleston, who never attended college and was always sensitive to his lack of formal education, coveted a relationship with credentialed professional scholars even as he worried about his worthiness to be counted among them. “I have grown less confi dent in expressing my opinions,” he explained to one correspondent who desired him as a scholar to weigh in on a controversial historical question. “When I see what asses most writers make of themselves in the eyes of scholars by their confi dent statements of traditional pictures in American history about which I do know something,” he confessed, “I resolve not to make a fool of myself in the same way about other things.”150 But Eggleston underestimated the high regard in which his judgments were held, especially by fellow scholars who numbered him as one of their own. As evidence of this acceptance, in the weeks and months after publication of The Beginners of a Nation, Eggleston’s desk “was fl ooded with letters of congratulation from writers and editors, from other historians, from friends he had known years before and had almost forgotten, from perfect strangers and from relatives. Autograph hunters besieged him. Editors begged for articles. He was suddenly a famous man.”151 In 1884, he had been one of the several dozen writers of history invited to join the American Historical Association, an invitation he accepted.152 The offi cial journal of the association, the American Historical Review, now proclaimed

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 214214 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM him as one of the profession’s leading lights. Herbert L. Osgood noted that Eggleston had done a marvelous service for New Historians within the profession by providing “a study of life as it actually existed,” applauding the novelist-turned-historian for producing a “realistic” work of “such beauty and force as to make the book at once a history and a contribution to literature.”153 Cur- rent Literature paid Eggleston the highest compliment (although he may not have appreciated it fully given his earlier conversation with Parkman) when it called The Beginners of the Nation “the most ambitious American-history undertaking since Bancroft.”154 The fi rst volume of Eggleston’s “grand design” was so encouraging to many in the profession that on the strength of its reception he was elected to the presidency of the AHA. He had done yeoman’s work as a member of its supervisory board for a number of years, and he had helped to promote the work of the organization in the Century Club in New York City, where he wrote much of his masterpiece, but he was nonetheless startled by the appointment.155 In fact, there is perhaps no better indication of the overlap of amateur and professional concerns in the fi rst decades of the AHA than this election, since Eggleston had none of the professional credentials we often associate with the presidency of this association. Of course, as Peter Novick has noted, the notion that the AHA was an exclusively “professional” organization in the fi rst decades of its inception is a misconception anyway. “Before 1907 the presidents were almost all amateurs; from 1912 through 1927 only one-third had the Ph.D.; from 1928 on, almost all were, by both training and occupation, professionals.”156 That said, Eggleston was unusual for his lack of academic pedigree, even among amateur historians who had been elevated to the association’s highest position. It was standard procedure for the incoming presidents of the association to deliver addresses at the commencement of their duties, so Eggleston spent the summer of 1900 working on his remarks. Titled, appropriately, “The New History,” his presidential address was intended to serve as an expression of the realist methodologies and social history techniques he had been employing in his “grand work.” The opportunity to present his thoughts on the practice of history he accorded “one of the honors of my life.”157 Unfortunately, Eggleston was not able to deliver his presidential address personally before the scholars who attended the AHA annual meeting in De- troit in December 1900 because of illness related to a stroke he had suffered the year before. The speech was presented instead by amateur historian James Ford Rhodes, who had trouble with its admittedly “rambling and anecdotal” style but who did his best on behalf of its themes and modernist outlook.158 Eggleston spoke openly in the address about the need of American historians to draw lessons from those European thinkers such as Augusta Thierry

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 215215 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM and Michelet who “told the history of the people,” since “those who speak English have been the slowest to introduce the new history.” Turning his attention to the recent work of the so-called Committee of Seven, scholars affi liated with the American Historical Association who investigated the teaching of history in schools, Eggleston noted that American educational institutions needed to promote history as a way of reaffi rming civic traditions but also of initiating responsible change.159 “The great mistake” of school textbooks, he argued, “is the misapprehension of the purpose of history.” The object of teaching history “is narrowly said to be to make good citizens—intelligent voters. In this calculation, the girls are left out,” he added with an unusual sensitivity to gender in a male-dominated profession. “The main object of teaching is to make good men and women, cultivated and broad men and women.” Deprecating some of the sloppy techniques of popularizers in his own day, Eggleston expressed optimism that “History will be better written in the ages to come.” He ventured a guess that “when the American Historical Association shall assemble in the closing week a hundred years hence, there will be, do not doubt it, gifted writers of the history of the people” who will have produced “the history of culture, the real history of men and women.”160 In this he was right, of course. With these prescient comments, Eggleston signaled the completion of his personal odyssey from popularizer to professional. As Ellen Fitzpatrick has noted, “Eggleston used his presidential address to portray historical study at a crossroads and to reassure his colleagues that progress remained a powerful leitmotif even in a revivifi ed modern history.”161 Proclaiming history “the great prophylactic against pessimism,” Eggleston argued: “There never was a bad, in the fi ve progressive centuries, that was not preceded by a worse. Our working people live from hand to mouth; in the eighteenth century and in England it was from half empty hand to starving mouth. Never was the race better suited than in this nineteenth century—this twentieth century on the very verge of which we stand.”162 Much of this, of course, was declamatory rhetoric that echoed the nationalistic cant of popularizers like Ridpath and others. But as Fitzpatrick has pointed out, Eggleston had also done much in his speech “to encourage a history that was cut free from what he viewed as the stranglehold of traditional political history.” The next century, he hoped, would witness a partnership between amateurs and professionals in pursuit of a social history agenda. “Eggleston’s parting message to the historical profession was that the time had come for a ‘new history,’ ” one that would require his colleagues “to set aside politics and explore ‘cultural history’ ” in earnest.163 It was advice that, revealingly, he himself did not always follow in the last years of his life, as politics and culture collided in some unanticipated ways.

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 216216 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM The Cold Shoulder

If professional historians had any concern about Eggleston’s scholarship, it was that the realist novelist–turned-historian did not have a realistic sense of the magnitude of what he had taken on. In fact, his professional life recapitulated in revealing ways the central dilemma at the heart of the New Historian’s inclusive methodology. In The Beginners of a Nation, Eggleston devoted 350 pages of text to a discussion of the brief chronological period between 1607 and 1650, a scant percentage of the projected “grand work” that was to encompass all of American history. Paul Leicester Ford estimated that Eggleston’s project would require fi fty volumes in its present form to reach completion, adding with concern: “We have an uncomfortable feeling that the author has in hand a task beyond his powers—it may be beyond anyone’s powers—to achieve with full justice to his subject.” The enormous scope of the work jeopardized its value in Ford’s estimation, especially given the author’s commitment to accuracy of detail. “Mr. Eggleston has built up a skeleton with admirable skill, where we would rather have had a picture of that skeleton a little less accurately articulated, but clothed in fl esh and blood,” Ford wrote.164 Suspecting that Eggleston had not avoided successfully the false assurances shared by many popular historians that they could tell the entire story of American development on their own, Ford and others encouraged the author to leave such synthetic histories to collaborative groups like the dozens of scholars organized by Justin Winsor, whose magisterial eight-volume Narra- tive and Critical History of the United States had just been published.165 Even Winsor, who had employed numerous historians in his wide-ranging work, felt the inadequacy of his own efforts at completeness. “I may confess that I have made history a thing of shreds and patches,” he wrote of his collaborative effort in “The Perils of Historical Narrative.”166 How much less capable of achieving a holistic vision, then, would a single author such as Eggleston be? “The very breadth of his concept, seldom equaled by other historians, severely limited what he could do,” noted one reviewer of Eggleston’s project, who recognized that “one man, working alone, would have needed several lifetimes to present the complete story of the evolving American civilization.”167 And there was reason to believe that Eggleston’s tasks would inevitably get harder as he completed his writing on the seventeenth century, since the “complex relations” of French, English, and Spanish colonies in the eighteenth century would require greater research and a wider ranging historical intellect. Wil- liam Trent predicted: “For about a century he will probably resemble a painter who passes on to larger and larger sheets of canvas; but with the period of the French wars his diffi culties will begin to culminate.”168 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 217

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 217217 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM These fears for Eggleston’s project expressed by professionals suggested their ongoing debate with popularizers regarding the proper scope and ambition for historical study. On the one hand, popularizers like Bryant, Gay, and Ridpath had aspired to write broad, sweeping histories that reduced the entirety of American history into manageable and marketable texts. On the other hand, a growing and increasingly powerful group of professionals attacked such reductionist efforts, declaring popularizers irresponsible in the naive assumption that they could subsume all of history into digestible metanarratives. As the lines between amateur and professional historians were drawn wider, professionals declared themselves committed to studying smaller pieces of the historical landscape, writing shorter monographs on limited topics that emphasized the accuracy of their factual research and the credibility of their historical arguments. Publishers sought selected markets for these narrower works, and new university presses offered publishing opportunities for scholars who had been required previously to compete in the popular marketplace.169 Be- fore the turn of the century, John Higham has noted, “professional historians had virtually no vehicle, except the annual reports of the American Historical Association and its Review, capable of reaching a nationwide scholarly audience.” By the fi rst decade of the 1900s, however, agencies such as the Yale University Press began publishing “serious books of general intellectual interest in addition to research studies.”170 Given that the “more important results of monographic work seem readily to fi nd publishers,” noted Albert Bushnell Hart, professional historians were obliged to concentrate their energies on “careful studies of special phases of American history,” leaving monumental works of the kind Eggleston was pursuing to the “old-fashioned historians” of metahistorical temperament.171 Popularizers, in turn, were required to work more effi ciently yet thoroughly in order to compete with these new, shorter publications fl ooding an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace for historical works. Eggleston understood and appreciated the desire of professionals to undertake specialized work. As a New Historian and literary realist, he had made a career of producing such particularized studies. He could not free himself, however, from the consuming desire (fi rst experienced with the success of his Hoosier schoolhouse series) for comprehensive literary projects intended for wide popular audiences. Like many of his predecessors in the genre of popular history, Eggleston “preferred the large canvas to the miniature, the rounded treatment of the monograph,” and he desired to “interest the general public” rather than communicate only with scholars.172 Despite election to the presidency of the nation’s preeminent historical association, then, Eggleston never embraced fully the intellectual constraints implicit in the professional mission,

218 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 218218 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4212:58:42 PMPM with its reduced breadth of vision and limited range of ambition. He spoke often of the democratic impulse at the heart of social history that encouraged him to imagine New Historians like himself as beleaguered popularizers. “Cul- ture was not the only focus of this new history, but it was an important tool in its democratic strategy,” Dorothy Ross has noted. “Because the social historians’ subjects failed to gain major political power and because the critique of oppression sometimes cast these subjects as the helpless and unwitting victims of dominant elites, culture became the site of their indigenous strength.”173 Eggleston often depicted himself as an outsider looking in at the professional organization whose endorsements he so deeply coveted even as he questioned their value as indicators of historical worth. Other “elitist” features of an academic approach to history disturbed Egg- leston and suggested the degree to which he was still a popularizer at heart. He disliked the strong scholastic bias of the organization and the stultifying regi- mentation of its operations. The AHA “meets at times and places impossible to me and discusses subjects I have no interest in,” he complained to a friend. “It seems to run in the interests of college professors only to give those of us who are not of that clan the cold shoulder.”174 Eggleston expressed concern as well that scholars were plotting too deliberately “for the time when trained historians would cover the country, when their standards would be the only standards for history, and when the American Historical Association would not only be a professional but also a truly national organization.”175 The desire on the part of professionals to “academize” history, he believed, was dangerous because it threatened to ignore the needs of average readers who desired less pedantic treatments. “The one advantage that Eggleston had, though he recognized it only dimly, was that he was not academically-trained,” his biographer noted. “He had no formalized discipline to depart from, no depart- mental tradition or loyalty to rebel against, no preconceived notions to shed. Instead, he had a realist’s instinctive determination to be faithful to actualities, and a novelist’s desire to produce an account of his fi ndings that would be of general interest.”176 Some professionals were frustrated with Eggleston, in turn, for what they perceived to be a too generous (because too expansionary) defi nition of what constituted useful historical evidence. For every professional historian like James Harvey Robinson who, like Eggleston, called for a widening of the scope of historical study, there were hardliners who refused to embrace New History as a viable approach and who warned of its dangerous alliances with the new social sciences. A professor of history at Columbia, William Sloane, announced in the pages of the American Historical Review that scholars must exercise extreme caution in their use of social scientifi c methods. “We must not go too far Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 219

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 219219 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM in yielding to a popular clamor, nor admit that the weight of the individual in modern life entitles his occupations and beliefs to more than a certain moderate share in the story of the organism to which he belongs,” he wrote. “[K]eep the emphasis on the state.”177 To the charge that such a reduction in scope was exclusionary because it ignored those outside the political arena, Sloane argued that historians were limited in what they might say about the past by the paucity of truly reliable historical records. Though high-profi le political fi gures don’t “speak for the anonymous masses,” Himmelfarb has noted of such a position, the historian “cannot afford to ignore the considered judgments” of such historical actors. What Sloane and others objected to was the assumption of New Historians that public documents and papers should be devalued because “truth is best revealed . . . at the level of least consciousness”—that is, in private reminiscences and psychological profi les. “There is something slanderous about this assumption,” Himmelfarb adds. “It implies that a great contemporary, precisely when he is at his greatest, expresses himself most carefully and deliberately, is least to be trusted to tell the truth. And if the great men of the time are thus defamed, so also are all the anonymous people who bought their books, listened to their speeches, or otherwise accorded them the title of greatness.” In short, she argues, “[w]hat purports to be democratic history may well prove to be the most insidious kind of elitist history.”178 The ardent traditionalist George Burton Adams concurred with Sloane and initiated a campaign to purge the association of social historians like Egg- leston who embraced too readily the mission of the social scientists. Adams complained that political scientists had evidenced a kind of “patronizing condescension” in their attitudes toward historians, while geographers were “tempted by their enthusiasm to make more sweeping statements than they intend, and to advance claims of whose exact bearing they are hardly conscious.” Economists and sociologists were just as bad, reviving as they did the misguided “attempt to explain history, to get at the fundamental forces which are at work in it, to formulate the philosophy, or the science of history.” Most of all, psychologists represented an “aggressive and vigorous school of thought” in pursuit of “an ultimate explanation of human history.” Adams claimed that “the social psychologists would explain great race characteristics, Roman conquest, Italian art, English literature, great historic movements, advance and reaction, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, by psychic forces whose laws of action they would formulate.” In short, Adams viewed New History as a perversion of the synthesizing tendencies of an earlier era.179 Rather than be distracted by such contingencies, Adams urged professional historians to stay focused on the primary business of marshaling facts, a task not suffi ciently broad-minded enough to satisfy Eggleston.180

220 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 220220 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM Orthodox professional scholars in the American Historical Association were also troubled by the lingering taint of fi ction in Eggleston’s works. As the standards for acceptable scholarship tightened within the profession, there was a growing distrust of those who had practiced the novelist’s art, especially realist writers. “No matter how sincere their quest for truth, no matter how brassy their claims of objectivity,” G. B. Adams insisted, the realist writer’s rhetoric of “taking reality simply ‘for what it is’ ” could not be trusted. Former novelists such as Eggleston “promoted more than documentary accuracy,” he argued; “[t]hey wanted to use realistic representations of contemporary life for a special purpose to rein in the runaway aspect of a turbulent new society.” Many within the profession rejected such blatant pragmatism. History should not be used in the service of reform, Adams argued, because that would make it beholden to political agendas and ideologies.181 Skeptics such as Carl Becker added that “progress, too, was not a force inherent in the world but the result of an act of will in interpretation” and was therefore subject to distortion and abuse.182 Eggleston was not philosophically inclined enough in temperament to trouble himself with such matters conceptualized in quite these ways, but what Ernst Breisach said of Charles Beard remained true for Eggleston as well: “the science part of the social sciences, particularly the search for an affi rmation of laws, always remained less important than the social part of the phrase, understood as a spur to activism.”183 Since his days as a minister, temperance leader, and editor of the Independent, Eggleston had felt a displaced sense of responsibility to social causes that was not always satisfi ed by writing history, even social history. The selfl ess impulse to change the world occasionally reared up and distracted him from his grand design, as it had Ridpath in a more political way. Midway through the writing of The Beginners of a Nation, for instance, Eggleston became a leading lobbyist in Congress for an international copyright law still unsecured despite the fi fty years that had elapsed since the creation of Duyckinck’s Copyright Club. Eggleston succeeded, however, where the Young Americans had failed. He became a dedicated lobbyist for the Ameri- can Copyright League, testifying numerous times before Congress, writing endless articles for popular literary and political journals, and helping to raise funds for lobbying efforts.184 Some of his work for reform magazines on behalf of the copyright law was among the best he ever produced, and he thought his style well suited to the format. Declaring himself a “public-spirited man,” Egg- leston admitted that his leadership role in the ACL was “not unpleasant” to his “vanity” and that the “discovery of unsuspected ability in a new direction” was “very gratifying.”185 He wrote proudly to Lillie of his newfound identity: “I have cranky authors to pull into line and crankier publishers to contend with. I am all at once a politician.”186 When a copyright law was passed fi nally

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 221221 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM by Congress on March 3, 1891, Eggleston’s efforts on its behalf were acknowledged by supporters who honored him by making one of his novels, The Faith Doctor, the fi rst work of any American author protected by the legislation.187 The publication of The Faith Doctor in 1891 reminds us that Eggleston was still writing works of fi ction even as he pursued his historical scholarship. Un- like Eggleston’s Hoosier novels, however, this work, which was set in Manhat- tan and treated social themes, was construed as a political statement about urban unrest.188 It was one of several ongoing literary projects that fed in him a reform impulse not unlike the one that had motivated Lippard to write Quaker City or had compelled Ridpath to run for Congress and assume the editorship of the Arena. In all three cases, such literary endeavors were perceived as impediments to their authors’ reputations as historians. “An ideal scholar may be one who can pursue his research and writing undistracted by events around him, however raucous or alarming,” Eggleston’s biographer has written, but he “fell short of this standard; he had too lively a conscience and too strong a humanitarian zeal to hold aloof when good causes needed support or bad ones needed to be condemned.”189 A few professional historians applauded Eggleston’s pursuit of history tinctured by a sense of public responsibility no matter what the toll on the pace of his scholarship. “We prefer to have history written by a man who believes something, as Mr. Eggleston does,” agreed the editors of the Messenger.190 Most others viewed his participation in political crusades as “unprofessional,” especially those who conceived of objectivity as not only a methodological goal but also a heuristic device. For many such scholars, detachment meant not only critical distance in writing but physical separation from the political arena where objectivity was sacrifi ced too easily on the altar of partisanship.191 Eggleston’s commitments to the “causes of the people” made it diffi cult to maintain that separation. No cause was more important to Eggleston than the antiwar movement associated with the Spanish-American confl ict of 1898. Unlike Lippard, who had written popular histories of the War in Mexico as a way of confi rming his commitments to the national mission, Eggleston lobbied against the Spanish- American confl ict in verbal and written diatribes that called into question the political priorities of the nation. Aligned with fellow writers such as Mark Twain and Bret Harte of the Anti-Imperial League, Eggleston viewed the military struggle over Cuba and the Philippines as an utterly contemptible contradiction to democratic principles and warned the American people that its pursuit would put the nation on a path that would ultimately destroy its credibility and its culture. Using his pen to condemn those who would push Americans into a war that “people can’t agree just what it is we mean to fi ght about,” Eggleston wrote numerous journal articles that criticized the confl ict 222 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 222222 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM in startlingly anti-American, anti-government terms.192 In language far more outspoken than he had used in his earlier, more noncommittal treatment of the Civil War in the Household History, he urged Americans to see the immo- rality inherent in the nation’s misdirected international behavior. Like Twain, Eggleston risked “his reputation, his career, and his fortune taking an uncompromising public stand against the war,” but he was adamant that he could not respect himself as an American historian without speaking out about the disrespect the American people were exhibiting toward the world.193 Hoping to lose himself in the seventeenth century during an extended research trip to Washington, D.C., where he was researching his magnum opus, Eggleston was forcibly thrust back into the nineteenth by the unavoidable hypocrisy of the war. The archives gave way to the lecture circuit. “Living right at the door of Congress in this tiresome time I don’t seem to care much for American citizenship,” he told one shocked audience, adding that “the study of history with reference to it has made half a nation of irrational jingoes.”194 That kind of frankness got Eggleston into trouble with several of his publishers, especially those at the American Book Company, who were in the process of marketing an 1899 revision of his First Book in American History, and who worried that such antipatriotic pronouncements would reduce sales of the work.195 Editor Russell Hinman took special issue with Eggleston’s statements about the role of the United States government in the overthrow of the Spanish government in the Philippines and with the politicization of that rebellion in the text of the First Book in American History. Eggleston’s original draft on the subject noted that Admiral Dewey had encouraged the rebellion by bringing rebel Emilio Aquinaldo with him from Hong Kong to the Philippines in anticipation of a coup. During the copyediting process, Hinman altered the passage by eliminating mention of Dewey’s role and noting that “a rebellion against Spanish authority was in progress” before Americans became involved in the global confl ict. Eggleston was furious at the unauthorized revision. “I have no doubt of the accuracy of your statement,” Hinman responded, “but I think my modifi cations will be less likely to excite adverse criticism.”196 Although the historian complained strenuously about such decisive reworkings of his text, his publisher prevailed by appealing to Eggleston’s latent sense of nationalism. “We did not all agree about going to war,” assistant editor Henry Vail wrote, “but we do all agree that we fi nished the job quickly and successfully. Now we want to congratulate ourselves and make ourselves fancy that we would have done as well or better if the chance had come to us ward.”197 The staff at the American Book Company understood what Eggleston did not—that a popular historian and his publisher could not afford to alienate with anti-American rhetoric the very readers on whose revenues they depended so substantially for their livelihoods.

Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 223

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 223223 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM Meanwhile, perhaps as a distraction from such real world issues, Eggleston labored on with his monumental history. The Literary News optimistically informed readers at the turn of the new century that the man who “has already rendered great service to the student of our national life and its development . . . promises to do still more, for he is in the fulness of his majority, in the best period of man’s intellectual power—he is sixty-three.”198 In fact, he was failing badly in health during this period and was subject to bouts of pessimism, in- somnia, and even depression. The novelist-turned-historian had experienced similar mood swings just before publication of The Beginners of a Nation, as revealed in a letter to his daughter Lillie in March 1894: “Poor history!” he lamented. “No one man’s life is long enough for it, certainly not the life of a sickish man like myself with a dozen other irons and no wealth to come and go on.”199 In 1899, he admitted to Lillie again that the project was moving “mor- tally slow,” adding: “I can not go on writing long with sleep so broken.” To his wife he confi ded that the second volume of the series “will probably be my last book,” although she insisted that he did not have the temperament to “quit work” and “live.”200 That statement proved sadly prophetic. Despite his declaration that history was “the great prophylactic against pessimism,” he was so shaken by his ailments and the lack of suffi cient headway on his social history that he despaired of publishing even another word of his multivolume work. Like his contemporaries among historians, Frederick Jackson Turner and Lord Acton, Eggleston began to identify himself more with the masterwork he was unable to write than with the important scholarship he had completed. “The deeper each got into the complications of his pursuit of truth,” Warner Ber- thoff has noted “the more hesitant and uncertain he became,” and the “more unencompassable” seemed “the historian’s great traditional task of explaining what actually happened during some momentous span of the past.”201 By a heroic effort, Eggleston was able to fi nish the second volume of his magnum opus, The Transit of Civilization, in late 1900. It is a work that has grown in value over the years among professional historians. Ellen Fitzpat- rick has declared it a “remarkable” book, characterized by “sometimes stun- ning prose” and enlivened by Eggleston’s “impressive” explanations of the “complex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and passion.”202 Arthur Schlesinger Sr. credited The Transit of Civilization as the inspiration for his own later “History of American Life” series, and applauded its attention to “the ‘mental furniture’ the English newcomers carried with them to America and the modifi cations wrought by the wilderness conditions.” In his wide- ranging survey of American cultural history, Schlesinger noted, “Eggleston considers such aspects of life as the colonists’ scientifi c conceptions, their belief in an ever-present invisible world (which tended to be as real to them as the 224 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 224224 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM material world), their medical notions and practices, their religious and oral outlook, the persistence of class distinctions in law and custom, the popular distrust of lawyers, the neologisms and other changes in English speech, the modes of education and the ‘literature below literature that has to do with the hopes and fears, the beliefs and aspirations of uncritical people.’ ”203 Yet even Fitzpatrick and Schlesinger have admitted that The Transit of Civilization “tested the patience” of professionals and critics in its own day by ranging so widely and failing to provide coherence to the past.204 Barrett Wendell, in the American Historical Review, proclaimed it “confused, bewildering, and sometimes misleading”—the result of mental indigestion from too much browsing in libraries—and lacking in “imaginative sympathy with the human spirit of the times.”205 Charles M. Andrews, reviewing for the Political Science Quarterly, wrote of its “poor organization,” its “unscientiﬁ c approach,” and its “lamen- tably out-dated scholarship.” It was marred, he added by “a kaleidoscopic assortment of notes, lengthy, discursive and often bewildering.”206 These negative reviews pointed to the difﬁ culties others faced in attempting to provide the “total history” of a complex cultural age. Some criticized the use of “irrational and nonrational infrastructures of life”—ranging from “the economic interests of legislators to the eating habits of ordinary folks” rather than “the constitutions and laws that permit men to order their affairs in a rational matter”—that seemed to undermine “the rationality inherent in the historical enterprise”207 These skeptics feared that “if interests [became] more real than ideas and passions more compelling than reason,” then history would lose its moral compass. The devaluation of rationality on the part of New Historians struck many as “speculative, subjective, and dubious.”208 Still more troublesome from their point of view was the persistence of a conceptual juggernaut at the heart of The Transit of Civilization related to its holistic intentions. Despite his best efforts to create a rounded portrait of the social, economic, psychological, cultural, and even political attributes of the colonial age, they noted, Eggleston was never able to provide anything other than a partial depiction of the colonial scene. Reductionism of some sort seemed implicit in the narrative process. Recognition of this fact, in turn, invited criticisms from professionals who condemned the expansive agenda of New History as spreading the mission of history too thin. Iconoclasm in the name of thoroughness had its price, and that price was the loss of faith in the comprehensive potential of facts. “Ironically,” Joyce Appleby has written, “the work of social historians fostered the argument that history could never be objective. It is as if the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record had dug a potentially fatal hole in which history as a discipline might disappear altogether.”209 Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 225

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 225225 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM In this sense, then, Eggleston’s inability to complete his own grand work was not just a personal failing but an indictment of the entire school of New History as well, because it revealed just how difﬁ cult it is to produce history as a “totality.” These challenges of scope were underscored tragically by the death of Eggleston on September 2, 1902, of complications from a second stroke. After more than twenty years of nearly endless research, he had but two volumes of history to show for his trouble, and these had been offered with excuses by Eggleston, who thought they were unready for publication. “It seemed better . . . to redeem from the chance of . . . mishap a portion of my work, by completing this most difﬁ cult portion of the task,” Eggleston wrote in explanation of his decision to publish The Beginners of a Nation prematurely, “in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night must fall, the results of my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over by darkness.”210 Now that darkness had come to Eggleston, popular history was enveloped in it as well. At the time of his death, Eggleston felt betrayed by many in the profession, and they by him. He had done much to create linkages between professional and amateur historians, but his histories had also raised fundamental questions about historical technique which just as readily divided them again. New History and Old History still remained separated by conceptual chasms that could not be bridged; popular and professional forces continued to repel. Still worse, some believed that the very disciplines New Historians such as Eggleston had used “to subvert the conventions of old history”—disciplines such as sociology, economics, and psychology—now, ironically, “threatened to subvert history itself.”211

226 } “The Past Everything”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 226226 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM Thus from the specious present, which always includes more or less of the past, the future refuses to be excluded; and the more of the past we drag into the specious present, the more an hypothetical, patterned future is likely to crowd into it also. —Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian” (1931)

5...... “A Background

of Real History”

Edward S. Ellis

And the Dime Novel

as History

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 227227 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4312:58:43 PMPM Underclothes, Dime Novels, and Whifﬂ etrees

As the reaction to Edward Eggleston’s popular histories suggests, the late nineteenth century witnessed an intense debate over what constituted the proper subject matter of history and how that subject matter should be presented to the public. The breakdown of narrative coherence implicit in the New History program and the emergence of a modernist skepticism caused some to fear that history could not be relied on to guide Americans in clear and directed ways. As Alice Kessler-Harris has noted, social history of the sort Eggleston and others practiced “was colorful and anecdotal but lacked [an] explanatory capacity” that always had been at the heart of the historical enterprise. Focus on the “inner life” of a specifi c moment in time “might reveal an event in depth, but it moved historians away from the conventional narrative form,” distracting them from the traditional goal of telling a story causally through an understanding of “long-term change” and substituting a concern with “in-depth interpretation of an instructive event.” The result “was to reify the experiences of each human being, treating each as if it refl ected the experience of all; and all as though they were equally instructive.” Democratic and popular, to be sure, such techniques nonetheless encouraged the “romantici- zation of ordinary and folk experience,” prompting “frequent criticism of the static nature of social history” and raising questions “about whether it helps or inhibits an understanding of broader historical processes.” Another consequence of social history, Kessler-Harris notes, was “fragmentation,” since “the kinds of painstakingly detailed portraits that emerged resulted in our knowing more and more about less and less.”1 With the sacrifi ce of teleological perspective came a loss of integrative coherence. Popular historians who rejected grand, synthetic themes left themselves open to accusations of triviality by those who later condemned social history as “a gathering place for the unscholarly, for historians bereft of ideas and subtlety.”2 Knowing more and more about less and less was not the ambition of many educators in the late nineteenth century. Much of the criticism expressed by professionals regarding the unstructured nature of social history centered on its negative infl uences on children, since young Americans were presumed to be most susceptible to the pernicious effects of “bad” history, with bad understood as historical productions that failed to provide coherent narrative paradigms for the shaping of model citizens. At least with the heavy-handed popular histories of Irving and Frost the moral lessons of the past were clear and unmistakable. In particular, there was a feeling among professional educators that New Historians were not succeeding in an implied mission to service the nation by training children to an appreciation of moral values as revealed 228 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 228228 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM in history. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, various states implemented statutory laws requiring the directed study of history in American public schools as a means to that end. An 1881 law in Florida required each teacher of history to “labor faithfully and earnestly for the advancement of pupils in their studies, deportment and morals, and to embrace every opportunity to inculcate precept and example, the principles of truth, honesty, patriotism, and the practice of every Christian virtue; to require the pupils to observe personal cleanliness, neatness, order, promptness, and gentility of manners, to avoid vulgarity and profanity, and to cultivate in them habits of industry and economy, a regard for the rights and feelings of others, and their own responsibilities and duties as citizens.”3 Such civic-minded educators were troubled by the haphazard manner in which American youth absorbed the lessons of New History, when they learned them at all. Teachers acknowledged that social historians such as Ed- ward Eggleston and James Harvey Robinson promoted an exciting new expansion of the materials of history beyond the “dullness and triviality of lists of kings and battles” to the “signifi cance of underclothes, dime novels, and whiffl etrees.”4 Even Robinson rejected the “curious element of the sensational” in such sources, however, attacking especially the “kind of history which does not concern itself with the normal conduct and serious achievements of mankind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely selects the picturesque and lurid as its theme.” As with the scandalous Police Gazette, Robinson argued, the “intrinsic interest” in such subject matter “appears to vary in direct ratio to its gruesomeness.”5 The aforementioned dime novels, in particular, were considered dangerous for students because they defi ned history with reference to the sensational escapade, employing to excess the melodramatic devices inherent in trapper adventures, pirate tales, and detective stories.6 “Ground out by weary hack-writers,” Russel Nye has noted, such novels were deceptively “simple and direct” in their style, “incredibly infl ated” in their rhetoric, and “excruciatingly bad” in their composition. Gore was an essential component of all such writing. “Twenty deaths per novel was not unusual,” Nye has suggested, “and the formula demanded at least one dangerous crisis per chapter . . . with ‘a hero, a villain, dustbiting redskins, three Colts, thin air, and much desperado dialogue,’ and proceeded from there.”7 Teachers worried that no matter how diligently they worked to establish standards in classrooms for an appreciation of the right kinds of history books, all would be lost if, once out of school, children were exposed to less virtuous historical literature. In particular they feared the unscrupulous vendor who lined “the news-stands and shop-windows along the pathway of the children from home to school and church, so that they could not go to and from these places of instruction Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 229

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 229229 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM without giving him opportunity to defi le their pure minds by fl aunting these atrocities before their eyes.”8 The campaign of educators to protect the historical sensibilities of children exposed to such “tripe” intensifi ed in the 1880s when, in a highly publicized court case, a fourteen-year-old murderer blamed his violent nature on reading western dime novels.9 In an article entitled “What Our Boys Are Reading,” the eminent sociologist William Graham Sumner argued that such sad juvenile confessions confi rmed the dangers of expanding the subject matter of history (as New Historians sought) to include dime novels that were “either intensely stupid, or spiced to the highest degree with sensation.” Under the infl uence of such literature, family values were ignored, Sumner argued, while boys and girls were taught to respond only to the “indescribably vulgar” impulses of “physical pain and lack of money.”10 In Childhood in Literature and Art (1895), Horace Scudder agreed, declaring that “[a]nyone who has been compelled to make the acquaintance of this literature must have observed how little parents and guardians fi gure in it, and how completely children are separated from their elders. The most popular books for the young are those which repre- sent boys and girls as seeking their fortune, working out their own schemes, driving railway trains and steamboats it may be.”11 Western dime novels were especially troublesome because they encouraged children to “run away from respectable homes” and “to seek their fortune[s]” on the frontier, where they inevitably degenerated into “boy-bandits” and “little villains.”12 The self-proclaimed moral arbiter Anthony Comstock was the most vocal critic of the harmful infl uences these dime novels were ostensibly having on the minds and historical capacities of American youth. A special agent of the Post Offi ce Department and founder of the New York Society for the Sup- pression of Vice, Comstock conducted a decades-long campaign against what he called the menace of “evil reading.” Dime novels empty the youthful mind “of lofty aims and ambitions” and “shrivel” the soul, he proclaimed, making them a “devil-trap to captivate the child by perverting taste and fancy.” In his widely read jeremiad Traps for the Young (1883), Comstock warned: “This class includes the silly, insipid tale, the coarse, slangy story in the dialect of the barroom, the blood-and-thunder romance of the border life, and the exaggerated details of crimes, real and imaginary.” In such novels, the “unreal far outstrips the real. Crimes are gilded, and lawlessness is painted to resemble valor, making a bid for bandits, brigands, murderers, thieves, and criminals in general.” Comstock regretted that “these stories are allowed to become associates for the child’s mind and to shape and direct the thoughts,” since these “products of corrupt minds are the eggs from which all kinds of villainies are hatched.” He challenged publishers and vendors of such works “to show a 230 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 230230 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM single instance where any boy or girl has been elevated in morals, or where any noble or refi ned instinct has been developed by them.”13 Comstock took special aim at dime-novelists such as Edward S. Ellis, a writer who is often credited with having initiated the genre. Born in Ashtabula County, Ohio, in 1840, Ellis moved at a young age to New Jersey where he lived for most of his adult life.14 As had John Frost and John Clark Ridpath before him, Ellis got his start as a school teacher and later as a superintendent of education, although he was a jack of many trades. His brother-in-law, Harry Deane, was a professional baseball player for the Cincinnati Red Stockings Club, and Ellis, who was himself the fi rst president of the Trenton Baseball Club, spent a good deal of time securing a patent on Deane’s behalf for improved boot clamps for cleats.15 He composed music as well, especially songs that appealed to historical and regional identity, such as “De Louisiana Cane- brakes: Negro Song Chorus.”16 Later he wrote the lyrics to a popular political melody, “The Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to Spain,” which advocated for U.S. involvement in the Cuban Independence movement.17 He produced stories and edited several newspapers and magazines in the mid-1870s, including Public Opinion, Golden Days, and Holiday, the latter two specializing “in boys’ stories, inspirational biography, and history for both children and adults.”18 One of Ellis’s other passions was writing self-help manuals, such as Health, Wealth and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent and Child; to Man and Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor (1892), in which he advanced some rather bizarre and intriguing theories about life expectancy, claiming that humans should be able to live on average to the age of one hundred years.19 Some thought him an eccentric and a hack in the tradition of Lippard, but, as his prolifi c literary output and reputation suggest, he was not so easy to dismiss. On the strength of his remarkable career as an educator and writer, for instance, Princeton awarded him an honorary A.M. in 1888.20 As unusually eclectic as Ellis was, he was best known for the hundreds of dime novels he wrote over a forty-year publishing career. His most successful work was also his fi rst, Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860). Published when Ellis was only nineteen, it sold an estimated 60,000 copies in its fi rst week of sales and more than 400,000 over its lifetime.21 The novel’s remarkable reception had much to do with its fortuitous timing, since it was one of the fi rst and most successful experiments in the mass production of books. Purchased by Irwin P. Beadle & Company for a mere seventy-fi ve dollars, Seth Jones became the centerpiece of a vast and highly effective marketing strategy introduced by the company to increase sales among moderately educated, middle-class readers.22 The key was advanced publicity. Prior to publication, Erastus Beadle saturated the East Coast with billboards, painted barns, and

Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 231

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 231231 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM newspaper columns asking: “Who is Seth Jones?” Consequently, the “public waited expectantly for the famous opening words of the novel, ‘How de do? How de do? Ain’t frightened, I hope. It’s nobody but me, Seth Jones of New Hampshire,’ and ultimately bought a half million copies.” As Comstock and others claimed, however, Beadle’s “contribution to publishing was one of merchandising, not content.” The publisher “organized production, standardized the product, and did some shrewd guessing about the nature and extent of the market.” And, as Russel Nye noted, he “put 30,000 to 50,000 words of wild plot into a salmon-colored paper cover with a lurid illustration and sold it for a minimum price. The stories had been there for a long time—since the Indian captivity, pirate, and low-life tales of the eighteenth century—and Beadle simply applied mass production methods to them. His aim, he said, was ‘to see how much I could give for ten cents, cash sales, not credit.’ ”23 A quick glance through the pages of Seth Jones legitimizes some of Com- stock’s concerns about the sensationalism of Ellis’s works. The novel is set on the western New York frontier after the American Revolution, and, like Coo- per’s Leatherstocking Tales, it is fi lled with the kind of “unnerving captures, hair-raising escapades, and gratuitous violence” critics found so objectionable.24 Early in the narrative, Seth is captured by Mohawks and engages with them in a series of perverse demonstrations of tolerance for physical pain. After Seth squeezes the hand of an Indian until the bones begin “displacing, and yielding like an apple” or a “wet glove,” he has his hair pulled out at its roots by the warrior, his temple thus taking on “the appearance of white parchment with innumerable bloody points in it, as the blood commenced oozing from the wound and his neck seemed as though the skin had been scraped off!” In retaliation, Seth tomahawks the offending Indian, whose head, we are told, “was nearly cleft in twain (for an arm fi red by consuming passion had driven it), and the brains were spattered over numbers of those seated around.” Else- where in the novel, Ellis described the burning of frontier homes by “dusky beings,” “leaping and dancing, and appearing, in the ghastly light, like fi ends in a ghostly revel”; a mother and daughter killed by Indians, who were found lying “side by side, and weltering in each other’s blood”; and a captive who had been burned at the stake so that “[e]very vestige of fl esh was burnt off to the knees, and the bones, white and glistening, dangled to the crisp and blackened members above! The hands, tied behind, had passed through the fi re unscathed, but every other part of the body was literally roasted!”25 Others of Ellis’s novels introduced devices of the grotesque and absurd into the fi rst science fi ction formats. In his controversial novel, The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies (1865), for instance, Ellis altered a prosaic earlier story about eastern fortune seekers looking for gold out West by introducing

232 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 232232 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM a cast of bizarre characters who act out unusual dramas of dubious historical value. The central hero of the novel is a perverse Seth Jones fi gure named Baldy Bicknell, whose strange appellation derives from his having survived a scalping by Plains Indians. A horribly disfi gured reminder of the savagery of the West, Baldy must wear a hat at all times lest he be exposed to the sweltering western sun or the equally blistering taunts of relentlessly critical western min- ers. Baldy’s sidekick is a young, hunchbacked, and fatherless boy, the ingenious inventor Johnny Brainerd, who is incapable of participating in the hard physical work of “winning the West” because of his deformities, but who tries (with mixed results) to lend his technological expertise to the effort. Johnny is the creator of a still more curious traveling companion, an enormous, futuristic, iron robot dubbed the “Steam Man of the Prairies,” who marches across the plains intimidating Indians and expediting the work of mining. In their disturbing travels, these motley adventurers witness or participate in the slaughter of animals, the mutilation of human bodies, and mass death by scalding, all in pursuit of pecuniary gain.”26 While the introduction of a free-moving steam- engine robot on the western frontier encouraged some later to declare The Huge Hunter a science fi ction classic, many contemporaries viewed its threatening, destructive prospects as inappropriate, especially for children.27 Additionally, concerns were expressed about the rapidity with which Ellis and others wrote such historical novels, quantity being valued over quality by profi t-minded publishers. Predictably historical inaccuracies were rampant in such hurriedly produced works. As Paul Camp has pointed out, Ellis, who “never visited the frontier,” “committed such faux pas as having Indians and pioneers alike propel canoes with oars (complete with muffl ed oarlocks).”28 Some of these errors were undoubtedly the result of the unrelenting demands of deadline-conscious publishers and an unforgiving marketplace. This may account, in part, for Ellis’s efforts to obscure the authorship of some of his most hurried of his productions.29 Shortly after the publication of Seth Jones, he contracted with Beadle to write four dime novels a year and with other publishing houses to produce dozens of additional stories, many based on historical themes treated with equal superfi ciality. Ellis was a frequent user of pseudonyms (at various times he was Captain Bruin Adams; Colonel H. R. Gordon; the Ex-Reporter; Lieutenant R. H. Jayne; Captain R. M. Hawthorne; and Seward D. Lisle, an anagram of Edward S. Ellis), and it is therefore diffi cult to determine exactly how many novels he wrote, but literary authorities guess the number to be in the many hundreds, making him one of the most prolifi c and widely read authors in American literary history.30 Denis R. Rogers estimates that Ellis produced at least 467 major works during his career as well as more than 500 minor works such as sketches, articles, and poems.31 Some were

Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 233

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 233233 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM volumes of mediocre historical fi ction such as The Boy Patriot, A Story of Jack the Young Friend of Washington; Trailing Geronimo; and Campaigning with Crook.32 Others were nonfi ction pieces that applied the conventions of dime- novel sensationalism to historical events, such as King Philip’s War, Bacon’s Rebellion, and the uprising of Tecumseh.33 Almost all drew criticism from cultural arbiters like Comstock who challenged their authenticity and worth. Professional educators had additional complaints about how Ellis’s ideas translated into classrooms. Like John Frost, Ellis continued to teach and super- intend even while he was writing novels of an increasingly controversial nature on the theory that “a job in hand [was] worth two in the air.”34 Ellis’s frequent use of a nom de plume was designed in part to obscure his identity from his students, although, in many cases, it had the opposite effect. Having employed so many different aliases, that is, Ellis was suspected of being the author of every dime novel whose authorship was obscure, including some very bad ones he did not write.35 As Ellis began to dabble in school books, including the writing of primary history texts, concerns among teachers and parents increased, since the lines between sensationalist fi ction and dramatic nonfi ction often seemed blurred in his works. The amateur historian Don Russell remembers his mother giving him one of these histories to read, unaware that “the same Edward S. Ellis had written the fi rst successful dime novel and wrote more of them under more aliases than almost anyone else.” At the time “the dime novel was X-rated as the lowest form of entertainment, although its heroines were as pure as the Children of the Abbey and its heroes as noble as St. Elmo,” Rus- sell added. “But the boys of my gang were little contaminated by dime novels, mainly because we never had a dime. Besides, the public library was free, and there we could read Deerfoot on the Prairie and Hunters of the Ozarks by the same Ellis.”36 Not everyone had such easy access, however. A short statement in the New York Times in 1897 suggested that self-proclaimed censors of culture had succeeded in limiting the access of some children to the works of this novelist-turned-historian. “A notice has been posted in the Public Library of Boston and its branches,” the paper announced succinctly, “advising people that the works of Edward S. Ellis . . . are ‘no longer in the library.’ ”37 For his part, Ellis defended his writings as morally grounded and historically accurate. He bristled at postal offi cials and librarians who accused him of nega- tively infl uencing the reading habits of children or who threatened to charge him with “indecency” for circulating “immoral book[s]” through the mails.38 Ellis’s publishers, Beadle & Adams, maintained that such dime novels were not corrupting of the historical imagination, but rather were clean, honest, and accurate. To underscore this point, they issued a pamphlet of detailed “Instruc- tions for Prospective Writers” with advice about the does and don’ts of dime 234 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 234234 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM novel production. “We prohibit all things offensive to good taste in expression and incident,” Beadle and Adams noted. “We prohibit subjects of characters that carry an immoral taint; We prohibit the repetition of any occurrence which, though true, is yet better untold; We require unquestioned originality; We require pronounced strength of plot and high dramatic interest of story; and Au- thors must be familiar with characters and places which they introduce and not attempt to write in fi elds of which they have no intimate knowledge.”39 Ellis felt his novels met and exceeded these standards, and he was encouraged by the feedback he received from the chief editor at Beadle & Adams, Orville J. Victor, upon whose “learning,” “wide information,” “literary acumen,” “un- varying courtesy,” “honest, outspoken candor,” “absolute conscientiousness,” and “unswerving fi delity to the interests of his employers” Ellis relied heavily throughout his career.40 A leading paper of Chicago agreed, noting that “when a mother wishes to buy a book for her boy and sees the name of Mr. Ellis on the title page she need not fi rst read the book as a precaution, for his name is a guarantee that it is safe to put in the hands of her child. Hundreds of his juveniles are found in the libraries of our leading Sunday-schools.”41 Publishers of Golden Days, a children’s periodical “designed to act as an antidote to the cheap papers which teach children to become runaways, thieves, and outlaws,” agreed, circulating chapters of an Ellis novel in its fi rst number.42 Even the normally understated editors of the National Cyclopaedia found something to admire in Ellis’s novels: “They are clean, wholesome and instructive, usually with a background of real history, and while abounding in such incidents as delight young readers, are manly and moral in their teachings.”43 Ellis bent over backwards to establish the historical authenticity of what he was writing; he wished to be thought historically minded, if not a bona fi de historian. The distinction was important enough to him that he articulated its subtleties in nearly every work he produced. In a chapter of a history treating the “prowess of American seamen at successive eras in the national annals,” for instance, Ellis made it clear that too often the “origin and growth of the now formidable United States Navy” had been “the themes of the novelist rather than the historian,” the people turning to Fenimore Cooper primarily for “vivid and entertaining narratives of maritime exploits on the high seas and the country’s naval defenders.” While Ellis had no objection to novelists working on historical subjects (how could he, after all), and while he appreciated Cooper’s efforts at “maritime romance as furnished by high-spirited and patriotic” works such as The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Two Admirals, he also recognized that novelists had slightly different incentives than did naval historians such as Maclay and Mahan. “[W]hat has to be said of contests at sea between the United States and her enemies should be related with the gravity Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 235

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 235235 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4412:58:44 PMPM as well as with the truth of history rather than with the picturesque effects but fi ctional glowings of romance,” he wrote. Solemn truths were the province of historians. The differences between seafaring novelists and maritime historians were not as vast as their oceanic subject matter might suggest, however, since solemnity could be ennobling, even stirring in Ellis’s estimation. “The story told as history . . . will lack little of the fascination which novelists have thrown around the subject,” he wrote, “for the real is often no less thrilling than the unreal, fact no less marvelous than fi ction.”44 Ellis’s second major work for Beadle and Company, a historical study for juveniles of Pontiac’s Conspiracy published in 1861, illustrates these distinctions. On the one hand, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator was presented in the dime novel format and featured the sensation scene as its primary narrative device. On the other hand, the biography was advertised as a piece of sober historical scholarship that would edify youth on the rigors of frontier life in the eighteenth century. To underscore this latter point, Ellis dedicated his work to Francis Parkman, on whose well-regarded two-volume History of the Conspir- acy of Pontiac he relied heavily. Noting that the materials used in The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator had been gleaned from Parkman’s scholarly research in “the State Paper offi ces of London and Paris, the archives of New York, Pennsylvania and other States; from the statements of men who had seen and known Pontiac when living; [and from] the journals kept by men during the siege of Detroit,” Ellis suggested to readers that his work shared substantially in the academic merits of Parkman’s production, “which is one of the most inestimable contributions to early American history.”45 As if to confi rm the strength of the association, Ellis published a note he received from Parkman approving of the dime novelist’s use of his texts. “Pontiac’s war is an episode of so much interest in our history that I am always glad to see it brought before the public—at least by one ready, like yourself, to acknowledge assistance derived from the labor of others,” Parkman wrote Ellis. “It has, in one case, been my experience to meet with different treatment, entire chapters having borrowed, changed in nothing but words, & not always in these, without recognition of the original. I shall look with interest for your volume, and accept with pleasure the dedication which you so courteously offer.”46 Ellis also made a point of publicizing his efforts to secure fi rsthand accounts of historical incidents on which his dime novels and histories were based. In a piece he authored for the New York Times titled “Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians,” Ellis reprinted a personal interview he conducted with Col. Albert L. Mills of the “Army of the Indian Frontier” from 1879 to 1885 that served as important background information in later historical accounts of the western frontier. Recounting in detail Mills’s refl ections on the habits and superstitions 236 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 236236 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM of the Cheyenne and Crow tribes, Ellis’s article also served as a piece of self- promotion for his forthcoming “New Deerfoot” series treating Indian life on the prairies during the same period.47 Other eminent fi gures, some of whom were interviewed by Ellis and whose comments appeared in later publications, enjoyed and endorsed his works. Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, reportedly once entered a cabinet meeting “waving a copy” of an Ellis novel “in unconcealed delight.”48 William Tecumseh Sherman wrote Ellis to say that he was taken with the authenticity of the novelist’s depiction of Kit Carson, especially those parts that drew on Sherman’s own recollections of the man.49 Benjamin Harrison’s vice president, Levi Parsons Morton, declared that the “juveniles of Mr. Ellis are deserving of their wonderful popularity, for not only are they stirring, interesting and instructive, but they are clean and pure, and teach boys true manliness, obedience, honesty, truthfulness and all the virtues that make a youth a true and useful citizen and a blessing to the community in which he lives.”50 And a United States senator gave Ellis’s Oonomoo, the Huron, an “emphatic” (if slightly menacing) endorsement when he declared that the “man who didn’t like it . . . was not fi t to live.”51 Not everyone was as taken with Ellis’s veracity, however, and he received some justifi ed criticism for his lack of originality and for his purposeful distorting of sources. In the case of his book on Pontiac, for instance, Ellis admitted to relying perhaps too heavily on the “facts” of the conspiracy story as gleaned from Parkman and others. He was less forthcoming, however, about his wholesale appropriations of Parkman’s precise language, which even by the looser standards of the nineteenth century practiced by Frost and Irving constituted a brand of plagiarism.52 In an appendix to the History of the Conspiracy of Pon- tiac, for instance, Parkman had cited a “curious diary” deposited in the “His- torical Society of Michigan” that told of an incident on the day after the failure of Pontiac’s uprising in which a chief was “sent to the Pottawattamie village in order to seize an Ojibwa girl whom he suspected of having betrayed him.” She was allegedly given “a severe beating” with a lacrosse stick, although there was considerable doubt about the reliability of the story. Parkman cautioned readers that information about her treatment and subsequent life was taken from an “old Indian” who “told Henry Conner, formerly United States interpreter at Detroit, that she survived her punishment, and lived for many years; but at length, contracting intemperate habits, she fell, when intoxicated, into a kettle of boiling maple sap, and was so severely scalded that she died of consequence.” Without attribution, Ellis recounted the same episode in The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator using Parkman’s precise words but mangling their source in such a way as to give a false impression of their authority. A “curious” document exists in the “Historical Society of Michigan” about an Ojibwa girl Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 237

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 237237 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM who was “seized upon suspicion” of betraying the conspiracy by Pontiac and given “a severe beating,” Ellis wrote. “An old Indian, who, for many years, was United States interpreter at Detroit,” stated that the Ojibwa “lived many years afterward and, getting into bad habits, in her old age, she one day fell into a kettle of boiling sap, and was so badly scalded that she soon died.” In promoting the “old Indian” to the position of “United States interpreter at Detroit,” Ellis not only obscured Henry Conner’s important role as translator in the incident, he also ignored the secondhand nature of the transmission that had drawn cautions from Parkman about its use as a historical source in the fi rst place.53 In addition, Ellis disregarded Parkman’s sensible warnings against over- speculation about the fi ner details of those “thrilling confl icts between the hostile parties” now lost to the historical record. Ellis tried instead to fi ll the gaps left by more cautious historians with an unstable compound of oral tradition, literary mythology, and imaginative recreation, rarely missing an opportunity to embellish where decorative fl ourishes might help sales. For instance, Ellis reported in The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator that the chief’s scouts murdered a Canadian settler whose body was later buried in a shallow grave on an island. On visiting the spot the next day, friends of the murdered man found his hands “protruding from the ground, as if in an attitude of entreaty.” They buried him “more effectually,” Ellis noted, but upon returning a second time “to their horror, they saw the hands again.” It was not until the settlers could fi nd a priest who performed “neglected rites” that the body evidently found repose and rested in peace, Ellis wrote, the dime novelist using the sketchy oral accounts of the incident to try to convince readers of his “well supported” conviction that such an occurrence “could take place without any supernatural agency.”54 Parkman had also narrated the story of the supplicating hands in his biography of Pontiac, but he included a detailed appendix in which he attributed the account of the incident to unverifi able “tradition” and to the “credulity” of an “aged Canadian” source who was a rather gullible seventeen- year-old at the time of the murder.55 Ellis had reported the history of the event accurately enough, but he failed—either out of innocent negligence or purposeful obfuscation—to record Parkman’s cautions about its use in a work of legitimate history. For Comstock and others, it was precisely the question of what constituted a proper “background of real history” that was at the heart of the debate over the worthiness of such works. “The unreal far outstrips the real” in popular books, critics noted, causing readers to substitute for true history the “most improbable creations of fi ction.” “Such publications do more to debase the young than an endowed chair in every college in the land will or can do to 238 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 238238 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM ennoble them,” Comstock argued. Untrained historians such as Ellis claimed that their works were based on reliable facts, but their “monstrously absurd exaggerations” betrayed their authors’ “utterly false and debasing ideas of life.” Nourish a generation “on this sort of mental food, and it must be apparent to any candid mind that it will be a generation devoid of taste for that which is pure and noble,” Comstock added. Continuing the culinary analogy, he concluded: the dime novel “begets vapid, shallow-minded sentimentalists. The lofty thought they cannot understand. They would rate the most interesting history as distasteful, the choicest essay or poetry as dry and uninteresting. To capture at the threshold of life the fancies and hold them in bondage until fi ction supplants the real and study becomes irksome, is cruel and evil. Proper ambition is stunted, and the inspiration of lofty aims is supplanted by the vain imaginings suggested by this kind of light literature.”56 The solution, reformers argued, was to give children alternative models of history writing and to point out the distinctions between good and bad literature. “Again, let parents spend more time reading good books to their children,” Comstock wrote. “Gather them together during the day and read to them some wholesome tale, history, or other work, that shall help satisfy the cravings of the expanding heart; that shall cultivate the taste and lay a healthy foundation upon which to build in after years.”57 Not surprisingly, in his campaign to identify alternative reading lists for the study of the past Comstock ignored the popular histories by Frost, Bryant and Gay, Ridpath, or Eggleston. Works such as Ellis’s came under special scrutiny, however, because they were informed by the excesses of a dime novel tradition which made even the sensationalism of Bryant look tame. The casualness with which Ellis moved back and forth between the popular book markets for fi ction and history was especially irksome to his critics. “Boys may be entertained by the wrestling bouts and other incidents,” one reviewer noted of Ellis’s novelization of Bacon’s Re- bellion, “but as history made pleasant for the juvenile palate the book is open to criticism.”58 James Harvey Robinson agreed, calling works such as Ellis’s “gross misrepresentations within the bounds of formal accuracy.”59 In short, even open-minded cultural historians disposed favorably to the study of “underclothes” and “whiffl etrees” seemed unsure about dime novels.

“A Means to an End”

Educators who shared Comstock’s concerns were among those who organized themselves as a “Committee of Ten” at the annual meeting of the Na- tional Education Association at Saratoga Springs, New York, in the summer

Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 239

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 239239 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM of 1892, under the leadership of Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard Uni- versity. A subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and Political Society” included important fi gures in the American historical profession—Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, Charles Kendall Adams of Wisconsin, Edward Bourne of Adelbert College, Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, and James Harvey Rob- inson then of the University of Pennsylvania—and their charge was to draft an “infl uential curriculum plan” for the teaching of history in schools with special attention to “the proper limits of its subject, the best methods of instruction, the most desirable allotment of time for the subject, and the best methods of testing the pupils’ attainments therein.” From the outset of their work, committee members asked very practical questions such as: What was the appropriate age to begin instruction in history? and, What topics and methods were best suited to what grades?60 They also desired to establish national standards for historical literature of all sorts in schools, making specifi c recommendations as to how much and what kind of reading students should be expected to undertake. These discussions were important for what they did to call attention to issues that historians “were slow to confront as theoretical problems” but which they were compelled to address as “unavoidable questions of pedagogy,” including: “What to teach in history classes? How to select the material? How to organize and synthesize it? How to use history? And how to answer these questions in a manner relevant to Americans living at the turn of the century?”61 The subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and Political Society” reported that while many subjects were well established at the secondary level, “the function of history in education is still very imperfectly apprehended.” Therefore, committee members advocated further consideration of history as a way of “training the judgment, and in preparing children for intellectual en- joyments in after years, and for the exercise at maturity of a salutary infl uence upon national affairs.” They recommended that the study of the past begin in schools no later than the tenth year of age, with the fi rst two years devoted to “[m]ythology and to biography for the illustration of general history as well as of American history.” The college professor, the committee noted, fi nds “that his subject has never taken any serious hold on the minds of pupils fresh from the secondary schools.” Similarly, instructors fi nd, as had Ridpath at De- Pauw, that students “devoted astonishingly little time to the subject; and that they have acquired no habit of historical investigation, or of the comparative examination of different historical narratives concerning the same periods or events.” The solution, committee members insisted, was for specialists to recognize the value of having “the minds of young children . . . stored with some of the elementary facts and principles of their subject,” and for teachers to ensure “that all the mental habits, which the adult student will surely need, 240 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 240240 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM begin to be formed in the child’s mind before the age of fourteen.” In addition, they reaffi rmed the close connections between history and literature, lobbying for the use of “historical works or extracts for reading in schools,” for the writing of English compositions “on subjects drawn from the historical lessons,” for the memorization of “historical poems and other short pieces,” and for the “reading of historical sketches, biographies and novels, outside of class work.” They did not advocate a return to the belles lettres tradition of the mid- nineteenth century, but they did acknowledge the power of literary expression in the pursuit of the historian’s craft.62 The NEA report of the Committee of Ten inspired an independent investigation by the American Historical Association of the role of history in schools. “The Study of History in Schools: Report of the American Historical Asso- ciation by the Committee of Seven” (1900), which emerged from this work and was championed by the likes of Edward Eggleston in his AHA presidential address, echoed the earlier inquiry.63 Both reports endorsed an eight-year course beginning in elementary school that emphasized competencies in an established body of facts associated with the American past, although neither thought historical learning should be bound by facts. “In our judgment this is in itself the most diffi cult and the least important outcome of historical study,” wrote the Committee of Ten. “Facts of themselves are hard to learn, even when supported by artifi cial systems of memorizing, and the value of detached historical facts is small in proportion to the effort necessary to acquire and retain them.” Facts chosen indiscriminately from school textbooks, including “lists of lifeless dates, details of military movements, or unexplained genealogies,” were “repellant” to committee members who had been infl uenced by the New Historians’ preferences for processes over products. “To know them is hardly better worth while than to remember, as a curious character in Ohio was able to do some years ago, what one had for dinner every day for the last thirty years,” the NEA report suggested. “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that facts in history are like digits in arithmetic; they are learned only as a means to an end.” Instead, they argued, the role of history should be to develop the mind “by cultivating the powers of discriminating observation; by strengthen- ing the logical faculty of following an argument from point to point; and by improving the process of comparison, that is, the judgment.” Nor did they shy away from patriotic motivations for study: “America needs the training [in history] because we Americans know that our country is great, better than we know why it is great.”64 These educational reformers focused a good deal of attention on the corrupting infl uence of popular literature on the juvenile historical imagination. Again, members of the NEA subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and

Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 241

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 241241 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM Political Economy” were not opposed to expanding the range of reading materials; in fact, they advocated that teachers supplement textbooks with “distinct historical literature” and the use of “miscellaneous literature, poems, historical novels, and biographies.” “The sooner we can get a boy in touch with something else than a hand book, the better,” Resolution 21 of the committee report suggested. Viewing history and literature as “kindred subjects” in the manner of Duyckinck and others, committee members suggested that reading widely from a list of “desirable books” would advance their educations as writers and thinkers, since a “signifi cant advantage of history is that, intelligently taught, it may be a medium for the literary expression of the pupils.” The key was in selecting appropriate books as literary models for teaching the past. Committee members recommended Parkman, Prescott, Macaulay, Irving, Green, and Ban- croft among others. They also agreed it was suitable for students to read those “standard historical novels which will always be read, and which will always leave an approximately correct picture of the times which they describe.” They expressed a “hesitation,” however, with reference to the use of most such books to teach the past, since “the natural tendency is to skip the history in them or to receive a false historical impression if the history is accepted.”65 Works of historical fi ction of the sort Edward Ellis wrote were strictly out. These purging efforts by reformers bore some immediate fruit within the profession of history. When the Harvard historian Edward Channing proposed a new history textbook for use in schools to his publisher in 1897, he distinguished clearly between it and the productions of popular historical novelists such as Edward Ellis. A New York Times book reviewer acknowledged that Ellis’s technique of employing “the usual amount of deadly hand-to-hand fi ghting” which “boys like to read” certainly sold volumes, but Channing refused to resort to such tactics.66 He wished instead to market a school text “giving ‘real history’ and not Indian fi ghts and folklore,” and he promised would-be publishers that he would omit the details of “military history” in exchange for the “descriptions of colonial life” among the “ancestors of the heroes of colonial days.”67 Anything that smacked of what Shelley Streeby has called the “culture of sensation” was scrupulously avoided by Channing, who gained a reputation for scholarly (if sober) prose.68 It is not surprising, either, that Channing snubbed Ellis by failing to include any of the dime novelist’s works in his section on historical fi ction in the Guide to the Study of American History compiled in 1896 with the help of Albert Bushnell Hart. This comprehensive bibliographic work itemized the most signifi cant historical novels of the day, but Ellis’s productions evidently did not meet the minimum standards established by professionals for those works “widely accepted by school committees and college trustees, by teachers and by thinking people outside of 242 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 242242 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM schools and colleges” who value “sound learning and accurate judgment of cause and effect” with respect to the past. Even in the category of novels that “may be inaccurate in themselves, especially as to details, but which, nevertheless, leave a permanent and reasonably correct impression on the mind of the reader,” Ellis’s best-selling works were conspicuously absent.69 Had Ellis stuck to novels, even historical fi ction, he might not have been snubbed by professionals, but he insisted on trying to compete with the general histories produced by Channing and others. “As ‘blood-and-thunder’ juvenile stories fell under the proscription of the so-called custodians of culture and their sales slipped in the 1880s,” Gary Scharnhorst has noted, “Ellis turned increasingly to journalism and educational non-fi ction,” and these proved somewhat his undoing as far as scholars were concerned.70 Some of these works were small productions such as The Story of South Africa, which he co- authored with popularizer John C. Ridpath.71 Others, however, were volumes with wider circulation that revealed how much of Ellis’s historical consciousness was conditioned by his training as a novelist. Self-proclaimed “champion of the American Historical Association,” Albert Bushnell Hart, characterized writers such as Ellis as too imprecise in their epistemological thinking and too loose in their use of chronology to qualify as historians. He called them “imaginary” historians because of their “habit of writing tales that sounded exactly like history, and history that was chiefl y fi ction.” While Hart acknowledged that the “mysterious quality of mind” called imagination had a “place in historiography,” he added that this “shadowy something” was dangerous if it encouraged the irresponsible historian who “invents details” or “seizes upon the unimportant ones.” “What we need,” he noted, is imagination tempered in “a genuinely scientifi c school of history, which shall remorselessly examine the sources and separate the wheat from the chaff; which shall critically balance evidence; which shall dispassionately and moderately set forth results.”72 Especially troublesome from the point of view of scholars was Ellis’s tendency to recycle historical materials and to transpose scenes from one historical work to another without much concern for context. We have already noted certain similarities between novels such as Seth Jones and The Huge Hunter, both of which exploited time-tested frontier stereotypes developed by the novelist-historian James Fenimore Cooper and others.73 Still more profound repetitions occurred in Ellis’s biographies of western fi gures such as Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett.74 By the late nineteenth century, in fact, so much had been written about the frontier (both authentic and not) that it became almost impossible to say anything about the history of the back- woods without falling into highly prescribed, formulaic modes of literary expression. Indeed, the western “motif” had become conventionalized enough Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 243

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 243243 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4512:58:45 PMPM that it began to parody itself in melodramatic comic operas like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and in hundreds of quickly written western dime novels in which “endless repetitions” of plots, themes, and stock characters contributed to a perversion of form and function. Nostalgia and the perpetuation of memory were powerful historical forces operating in Ellis as well, and his endless pursuit of novelty in the dime novel market prompted him to become increasingly distorted and sensational in his plot lines.75 As Joy Kasson has suggested, “memory showmanship” established a link between “Americans’ understanding of their history and their consumption of spectacularized versions of it.” Hence, Ellis’s novels of this period existed at “the intersection of history, drama and nostalgia” and revealed a growing dependence on sensational violence and death as well.76 Murder, the insinuation of rape, and brutal assault had been standard plot devices in Ellis’s novels; they translated now into his popular histories in the form of nostalgia, mythology, and a fi xation with the ubiquitous past. In some ways, these sorts of repetitions should have been expected and could have been forgiven in a popular book market that relied so heavily on the exploitation of successful formulas as a guarantee of profi t margins. If form follows function, then mass-produced works such as Ellis’s blurred the lines “between fact and fi ction, history and melodrama, truth and entertainment” as a condition of their manifesting purpose.77 The bigger problem, however, was that this recycling of materials and styles occurred in works that were advertised as popular histories, not just volumes of historical fi ction. In 1880, for instance, Ellis published The Youth’s History of the United States, a low- budget operation, printed on cheap, nearly transparent paper but richly illustrated with wood-engravings.78 Its low price and readable style made the Youth’s History an instant success in the popular marketplace dominated by history books for adults. “I regret very much,” the literary historian Albert Johannsen once wrote, “that I did not have a book like Ellis’s Youth History of the United States when I was a boy, in place of a history that was simply a mass of names and dates and battles, as are, I am afraid, many of the modern school histories.”79 The fact that Johannsen did not have access to such a work in the early twentieth century, however, is revealing of the successful efforts of professional historians like Hart to keep volumes such as Ellis’s out of the hands of children. In particular, Hart complained that the recycling of themes and the interchangeability of settings obscured the particulars of historical context and encouraged sloppy temporal thinking. “Is there no penal code for those who undertake to write history out of something other than the records, to gloss the truth with a quality of mind which is outside the events themselves?” he asked pointedly of such derivative texts.80 244 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 244244 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM In constructing the Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis fl eshed out his narrative with material culled directly from his considerable stockpile of dime novels and juvenile biographies. His chapter-long account of Pontiac’s Conspiracy in Youth’s History was derived almost entirely from The Life of Pontiac the Con- spirator, published twenty-fi ve years earlier by Beadle and Company.81 To be sure, Ellis toned down some of the more theatrical scenes and edited out many of the most sensational passages (including that of the Canadian farmer with hands emerging from the grave, for instance), but he retained the melodramatic tone of the original throughout. He also repeated a number of the untidy editorial practices that had embroiled him with professionals earlier. In the 1861 juvenile biography, for instance, Ellis had reported an exchange between Major Gladwyn, commander of the Fort at Detroit, and Pontiac, whose ambush plans Gladwyn had uncovered. As usual, Parkman was the original source for the dialogue recorded by Ellis in the 1861 biography. “Why do I see so many of my father’s men standing with their guns in the street?” Ellis’s Pontiac demanded in The Life. “They are ordered under arms for the purpose of discipline,” replied Major Gladwyn in response.82 In the Youth’s History, however, Ellis altered the conversation (despite its having been presented as a direct quotation in the earlier work), accordingly: “Why do I see so many of my brothers in the streets with arms in their hands?” “They have been ordered out for exercise,” replied Gladwyn, in the same careless manner.”83 Small changes, to be sure, but they indicated a general lack of sanctity for precise dialogue and attention to detail. Professional historians interested in accuracy found such inconsistencies in cited material particularly glaring. In addition, Ellis recycled passages from the Youth’s History in later dime novels, suggesting that his conception of a reusable past was reciprocal and made few distinctions between history as literature and literature as history.84 This unrestrained transposing of narratives from fi ctional settings to historical contexts and back again suggested how porous was the membrane that separated fi ction from nonfi ction in Ellis’s works. At times it is hard to distinguish between the genres when sampling Ellis’s popular writings. In the Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis retained a dime novelist’s perverse interest in sensational, particularly maudlin, death, and he rarely missed an opportunity to dramatize the grim last moments of an historical fi gure’s life. Ellis’s description of the massacre of white settlers at Jamestown in 1622, for instance, borrowed liberally from well-worn frontier analogies and tropes of vulnerabil- ity and death in dime novels. “At the appointed time, as suddenly as those terrifi c cyclones sweep over the western prairies, the Indians rushed to the massacre of the settlers,” he wrote of the murderous incident. “The dusky warriors, gleaming with passion and hideous in their war paint, seemed to Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 245

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 245245 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM leap by hundreds from the ground, and with circling tomahawk, whizzing arrows, crack of guns, and yells, they assailed the colonists, who, till then, felt as safe as if in the heart of London town.” Gruesome depictions of death (female and infant death, in particular) drew extensively on well-established literary and visual traditions as well, many bearing striking similarities to scenes in Seth Jones. “The mother was stricken down at the door of her cabin while on her knees, with her child clinging to her breast and begging for mercy,” Ellis wrote in imitation of his earlier depictions of massacred mothers and daughters “weltering in each other’s blood.”85 As he had done so many times before in his western dime novels, Ellis also described with disturbing casualness and spectral allusion the death of Native Americans in the Youth’s History. “Some- times in the gloom, a fl ickering torch revealed the warrior, creeping stealthily among the ruins of the buildings, and a sturdy rifl eman sent a ball through his body,” he noted of a raid on a Massachusetts village during King Philip’s War. “The savage would leap high in the air with one piercing death-shriek, and that was the end of him.”86 The nostalgic temperament, romantic disposition, and penchant for recycling narrative elements evident in Ellis’s fi ction were also apparent in the Youth’s History. On many occasions in the four-volume series, Ellis asked readers to place themselves in the stream of historical events and to “imagine” what historical actors might have been thinking and feeling at propitious moments in history. “We can imagine with what interest the colonists [of Greenland in the tenth century] listened to the strange story told by Bjarni,” Ellis suggested to his young readers. These stories “must have stirred the hearts of the listeners,” he intuited. “How the eyes of the boys sparkled when they heard from the lips of their fathers and brothers the accounts of the deeds of daring, and what pride they must have felt when they refl ected that the Vikings from their native land were masters of the ocean, and that the vessels of all nations fl ed at the sight of them.”87 Of course, Ellis had no way to verify whether the hearts of the young listeners “stirred” or if their eyes “sparkled” or whether they felt “pride” in these tales. He did not even know for sure that young listeners were in attendance when such tales were told. He assumed these conditions, however, as a means of encouraging an empathetic response in his juvenile readers and, secondarily, in the parents who bought books for them. Ellis’s marketing techniques were sound enough from the perspective of sales, but they did not ingratiate him with critics who accused him of distorting history. There is no doubt that these novelistic devices and imaginative projections sometimes threatened the veracity of the Youth’s History. Ellis narrated the stories of Marco Polo’s exploits as if they were nearly indisputable, for instance, even though he acknowledged that “[n]othing that is read in fairy tales 246 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 246246 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM could equal those glowing pictures of some of the provinces of India.” While he admitted that the tales of Polo’s journeys were “idle” in some respects, he cited them as authorities because “they had, nevertheless, a basis in truth.” Speculative forays of this sort substituted for hard evidence on a number of other occasions as well. Ellis repeated Irving’s proverbial stories of Columbus confounding the court mathematicians in the fi fteenth century not because he could confi rm them, but because they were “certainly good enough to be true.” And Ellis quoted extensively from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York not because he could verify all of its “purely imaginary” descriptions of life in Dutch New Netherlands, but because the dime novelist believed that “some of the pictures he drew are true to life.”88 Given these proposi- tions, Ellis’s Youth’s History was viewed by professionals as no more useful than the much-maligned Popular School History of the United States (1889) by John Anderson, a textbook consisting solely of excerpts “from the writings of eminent American historians” and “other American writers of note,” as if the two categories were interchangeable. Anderson cited all those passages from Bancroft, Palfrey, Prescott and Motley that he believed were “required for ordinary school purposes,” but he also supplemented them with the nonfi c- tional and fi ctional works of Irving, Hawthorne, and Bryant in order to make a more “pleasant reading-book, with enough variety to give it all the interest properly belonging” to history.89 Professionals ridiculed this indiscriminate editorial strategy as irresponsible. “Variety” found its way into Ellis’s texts as well through the inclusion of quasi-historical explanations for events concerning which there was no consensus among historians. Scholars agreed, for instance, that General James Wolfe was killed on the Plains of Abraham during the Siege of Quebec in 1759, but no historian claimed to know precisely who fi red the fatal bullet that ended the British commander’s life. Into this intellectual breach marched Ellis, who asserted that Wolfe was actually shot by one of his own men, a New York colonial, who was seeking revenge for the death of his brother by fi ring squad at Wolfe’s command a few days before the battle. And the source of this unusual assertion? Ellis argued that in the 1840s, while still a “very small boy,” he had heard a story from his father, who had lived in upstate New York during his childhood, about a neighbor who claimed to have been the assassin of Wolfe. “Of course, this incident of my early life is rather vague,” Ellis admitted, “but that it actually happened I cannot doubt, for I have always been blessed with a retentive memory.” The soldier’s name was Smith, which, according to Ellis, made it diffi cult to trace him, “since he died long before my time, and his family was lost trace of.” That his father knew and remembered Smith well “cannot be doubted,” however, he insisted, because his parent was “rigidly truthful” Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 247

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 247247 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM and “accepted the venerable soldier’s statements as trustworthy.” Ellis recognized that parts of this murderous tale were “extremely difﬁ cult of belief,” and he acknowledged that “it may well be that at the sunset of his life [the storyteller] grew morbid and came to believe a mere fancy that had grown upon his mind.” But he placed faith in Smith’s assertion. “ ‘I don’t know whether I shot General Wolfe or not,’ the old man was wont to say, ‘but I do know that at close range I took deliberate aim at him and saw him fall when I pulled the trigger.’ ” That testimony was good enough for Ellis. “I have no doubt that many will not be willing to accept what I say about the matter of General Wolfe’s death,” the dime novelist acknowledged of his anecdotal evidence, “but at the same time I think that even the most skeptical must admit that my version of it may have foundation in fact.” He would not “vouch for the truth of it,” but he thought it “merit[ed] consideration.”90 Spurious assertions such as these about truth in history fueled concerns among professional educators in the NEA and elsewhere that standards of veracity were not being met in popular historical literature. Justin Winsor may well have been thinking about Ellis when he recounted the following exchange he had with a writer about the place of facts in historical narratives. “A distinguished author, who sometimes writes history, once said to me, respecting a proposition which he had made, that, if it were not true, it ought to be,” Winsor noted. “It was better than truth to him, and no doubt was to his readers.”91 Such conditional thinking caused some educators to despair altogether of history instruction where works such as Ellis’s superceded those by experts who knew “what to save and what to throw away.” Members of the Commit- tee of Ten warned against exposing students to the wrong kind of literature in a climate in which they were already disinclined toward reading textbooks. It is important to keep in mind that this professional attack was not directed against New Historians who sought to expand the subject matter of history in their works; indeed, a number of committee members, James Harvey Robin- son among them, advocated for wider-ranging cultural approaches to the past. What they refused to tolerate, however, were histories that did not maintain rigorous standards with reference to “a knowledge of the necessary facts” as well as proper “relations of cause and effect” in cultural context. “In the judgment of the Conference,” committee members noted, a standard history text “ought to be something more than the mere development of a ‘story.’ ” It ought to provide a truthful and complete picture, including “something on the social and economic side, as well as on the political” in accordance with the rigorous standards of ﬁ delity established within the profession.92 Ellis’s historical works were limited enough in scope and complexity even to be rejected by the totalizing (past everything) New Historians like Eggleston.

248 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 248248 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM Finally, Ellis was found lacking in his personal life in ways that refl ected on his reputation as a popular historian. In 1887, he and his wife underwent a very public divorce that resulted from the disclosure of an affair she was having with a close neighbor. The Ellises were married in 1862 and had had four children together before she was discovered having a relationship with Watson F. Van Camp, a former deputy state insurance commissioner of New Jersey, who for years had been one of Edward’s “bosom friends.” The descriptions in the newspapers of the disclosure of the affair—complete with overzealous detectives, a jilted husband, a cheating wife, and an exposed lover—were like something out of one of Ellis’s most tawdry dime novels. “There was an exciting scene when the guilty couple were discovered,” wrote a New York Times reporter assigned to the case. The irate husband had to be restrained by the offi cers investigating the scene, one of whom threw his weapon out the window “to prevent Ellis from securing it,” while his contrite wife “fell screaming upon her knees and begged her husband’s forgiveness.”93 Later, at her trial for adultery, Annie testifi ed “that she was guilty of infi delity, but claimed that her husband was aware of it, and encouraged her in leading a dissolute life to increase his income.” This shocked the courtroom and prompted the vice chan- cellor in the case to rebuke not only “the woman scathingly for her statements” but also “her betrayer.” Edward Ellis vehemently “denied all her allegations,” but the affair invited “universal comment” nonetheless. “Owing to the high standing of the parties in this city,” another New York Times article reported, “the case attracts unusual attention.”94 Generally, popularizers coveted wide, public interest in their activities, but this kind of notoriety was not helpful to Ellis’s reputation as a public fi gure, as an educator, or as a writer.

The Sacred Past and the Terror of History

The Committee of Ten did not enter into the details of the personal lives of the popularizers they condemned, but they did raise questions about the philosophical implications of their undisciplined historical techniques. One consistent complaint was that popular historians trained as ﬁ ction writers did not have a proper appreciation for how time should function in their works. Although the Youth’s History of the United States was structured chronologically (as a serialized novelist Ellis had a special concern for sequential narrative), it demonstrated a surprising lack of formal rigor with respect to time and an unusual casualness about strict temporal sequencing. “Now, you mustn’t forget the order of events, for, as I told you, I have not followed them in giving my account of the war with Spain,” Ellis warned readers toward the end Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 249

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 249249 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM of one edition of the Youth’s History. “I have thought it best to complete my account of the war in our own hemisphere before giving attention to events in the Far East; but in order to keep this account clear in your minds, you must remember that we are now going back to a time—May 1—which was before the destruction of Cervera’s fl eet and the decisive operations in Cuba and Porto Rico.” The Youth’s History also revealed a good deal of what might be called temporal stretching, historical fi gures anticipating events in ways that are anachronistic. “Can it be that [King James I of England] was wise enough to foresee what burst upon his country a hundred and fi fty years later?” Ellis noted in his description of the monarch’s hesitations about creating a colonial empire. Elsewhere he asked: Are not the “shouts and laughter” of the children playing “among the forest arches” in Thomas Hooker’s seventeenth-century Connecticut heard still in the “clear and joyous” ring of “the youngsters of today, who in turn must follow them?” Did not the founding fathers understand that the Constitution they developed in 1787 would “govern our country for ages to come?” he asked.95 Such temporal loosesness, encompassing vast historical periods and challenging traditional periodizations of time, left readers of Ellis’s works with an impression of what David Lowenthal has called a “timeless past,” that is, a history “characterized by little change” and focused on “timeless human nature.”96 Ellis’s philosophy of history suggested that the past was more cyclical than linear in its shape and that the true value of history was grounded not just in the specifi cs of a particular epoch but also in the agreement or logical coherence among successive acts, ideas, or events that informed the record of all human existence. He was not as concerned as Ridpath had been with charting the precise trajectory of these generalizing laws, because establishing directionality was not important to one who envisioned the universal lessons of history as relatively consistent over the entire time continuum. This Aris- totelian concept of a “changeless or cycling eternity” implied that the precise details of a specifi c historical moment were signifi cant only as they revealed the larger, mythic, patterns that characterized the human condition.97 Fic- tion writers such as Ellis were prone to “transhistorical” statements because they accepted without much question the philosophy of their mentor, Walter Scott, that the passions are “generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages.” The compelling fl exibility of this logic allowed novelists- turned-historians such as Edward Ellis to justify subtle manipulations of the historical record on the grounds that their works cast light on universal trends rather than on particular historical episodes.98 After all, for dime novelists accustomed to working in formulaic ways, it was the moral impact of the story that was important in the end, not the details of the plot.

250 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 250250 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM In some ways, Ellis’s conception of historical time was similar to the “sacred past” described by Mircea Eliade with reference to ancient cultures. Ac- cording to Eliade, the ancients “envisioned events not as constituting a linear, progressive history, but simply as so many creative repetitions of primordial archetypes” composing a story “that can be repeated indefi nitely.”99 Ellis’s tendency to draw the “big mythic picture” in his dime novels extended readily to his historical texts for children, in which he introduced unusual forms of historical sequencing. In the Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis argued that the things that made the United States a great nation in the late nineteenth century were “present at the creation,” especially “its deep, underlying love of law and order” which could not be eviscerated. Such blind faith in the consistency and persistence of mythological preconditions to nationhood encouraged Ellis to downplay or skip altogether those moments of disorder and those fi gures of contention that challenged the validity and felicity of the grand principle. Consequently, dissidents such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass did not fi nd their way into Ellis’s narrative, nor did women suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony. In addition, Ellis’s description of disunifying events—those he could not responsibly ignore, the Civil War, for instance—were tempered with references to the spirit of reconciliation and order that followed on their heels. As if waking up from a long national nightmare, veterans of the Civil War “wondered how it was that they had mutually tested their mettle on the fi eld of battle,” Ellis noted in the Youth’s History. “They wondered how it was they had come to fi ght each other at all.” If there was “one blessed truth established” by the armed confl ict, he concluded optimistically, it was “that never again could any section of this country become arrayed in arms against another section.” All perceived that the goal was to “make peace on a basis which would be satisfactory and might be rendered perpetual.”100 We fi nd strong evidence of Ellis’s endorsement of a perpetual, sacred past in another of his widely circulating works within the genre, Popular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to the Present Time (1900). In the introduction to this single-volume compendium, Ellis acknowledged that “it is convenient to separate [history] into the grand divisions” of Thalmeimer (Ancient, Mediaeval, Modern) as Ridpath had while teaching at DePauw but he added that such periodizations should not obscure the importance of the broad, generalizing principles cutting across all eras that reveal the consistencies of the human condition. According to Ellis, such ubiquitous themes included “the jealousies between nations, the widespread discontent, the intolerable conditions, the greed for territory, fanaticism, racial hatred, and the myriad causes of strife [that] array men against one another,” all of which, he argued, continued “to vex mankind as they will doubtless do for many a year before the dawn Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 251

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 251251 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4612:58:46 PMPM of that reign of universal peace for which we all yearn or pray.” The logical coherence of all ages made it as unnecessary as it was impractical for historians to attempt to narrate every detail of the historical record as New Historians desired. “To tell everything that has taken place since man was created would fi ll many big books,” Ellis argued in the Popular History of the World. “Much would be interesting and much dull, while hundreds of events were so similar that you would often think you were reading the same story over again. Then, too, you would become lost among so many incidents, just as if you were in the depth of a vast forest and did not know how to fi nd your way out.” The best plan for distinguishing the proverbial forest from the trees, he offered, was “to learn in what ways ancient history, or what men did in the early times, affected the history that followed.”101 “Time’s cycle,” as Stephen Jay Gould defi ned the outlook, “seeks immanence, a set of principles so general that they exist outside of time and record a universal character, a common bond, among all of nature’s rich particulars.”102 In the Popular History of the World, Ellis employed a “panoramic view of human time” in which “ancient, medieval and modern” were depicted not so much as distinct periods as components of a “unifi ed narrative.”103 This approach allowed him to emphasize the interdependency of countries and their respective histories. “As we advance in the study of modern history in Europe, we shall fi nd that the records of the different nations are much in- terwoven with one another,” Ellis wrote of his composite philosophy of history. Such a strategy also encouraged him to jump somewhat indiscriminately across chronological periods and to draw correspondences that underscored the substitutability of historical episodes. No analogy seemed too extravagant for Ellis’s transhitorical disposition. He likened Sparta and Athens to the North and the South in the Civil War; Peter the Great to an “Apache Indian”; and the excesses of Louis XVI’s France to those of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” In addition, he felt justifi ed in pointing out how certain human impulses (good and bad) revealed themselves consistently no matter what the temporal context. Hence, Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth century and Span- ish dictators of the nineteenth displayed a common pattern of cruelty that was culturally embedded and historically inevitable, according to Ellis. While Anglo-Saxons of every age tend to make changes to government by means of reform with “rarely any trouble,” he wrote in the ethnocentric language common to his age, those from southern Europe in general and Spain in particular sought change “by revolution, in which thousands of people do all they can to kill thousands of other people. That is the Latin style of improving matters,” he concluded. The Ottoman Empire was “no more capable of giving good government to her subjects than Spain,” he added, noting that Turks were 252 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 252252 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM “Mohammedans who hate all Christians with such intensity that they would be delighted to kill every one on the face of the earth.” The immutable nature of this defect, which had made Turks “an intolerable nuisance for centuries,” convinced Ellis that they, in turn, should be “blotted from the earth.”104 The irony that such a murderous sentiment was expressed by an Anglo-Saxon was evidently lost on him. Importantly, the Popular History of the World proceeded from ancient to modern through descriptions of a series of representative acts, one example often suffi cing to elucidate a generalized point about the human condition for all ages. Some of this was religiously motivated. After affi rming that “God made the earth, divided it into land and water, [and] brought into being all forms of vegetable and animal life,” Ellis noted, God then made all men “in His own image” so that, despite wide “difference[s] in their color and looks,” the entire species experiences life in consistent ways. In modern Egypt, as in Ancient Egypt, he wrote, “[e]very year the river overfl ows the country along its banks and leaves a thick deposit of mud, which so enriches the soil that all the people have to do is to plant the seed, which is sure to bring plentiful crops.” Against this backdrop of never-ending natural cycles, Egyptians proved themselves remarkably and tragically consistent in behavior. “The most striking feature of their civilization was its fi xed character,” Ellis noted. “It did not advance, the Egyptians of the latter days when the country became a Roman province, knowing no more than their forefathers of the fi rst dynasty.” Elsewhere Ellis demonstrated a preference for universal rather than particularist philosophies of history by arguing that the apocalyptic reactions of Europeans to the Dark Ages were symptomatic of that “most powerful” “instinct of self preservation” that “moves us” all in every age to recognize “that something must be done to prevent ruin and destruction.” The consistency of human experience was emphasized further in the resistance of Americans to the tyranny of England at the outset of the Revolution. The pursuit of independence was something almost primordial for Ellis, a force against which colonists were “resistless” because it appealed to the deepest instincts of human nature.105 Sacred history pursued in this fashion was rather comforting, of course, because it allowed Ellis to escape what Eliade refers to as the “burden of time.” Those who embrace a sacred past tend to “revolt against concrete, historical time” in “their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things, to the ‘Great Time.’ ” History (understood as the study of discrete moments in time) reminds us that we are mortal, that we are fi nite and limited by historical perspective. We can escape the “terror of history,” however, by maintaining the illusion that we can enter the historical continuum at any temporal point and understand the relevance for our lives of the stories Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 253

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 253253 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM contained therein.106 That is, the consistency of past experience renders us metaphorically immortal by allowing us to share in the universal experiences of others not in our midst. Ellis’s expectation that readers of history could be transported imaginatively from one age to another found a receptive audience among those in the late nineteenth century fascinated by the time-travel themes of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.107 For Ellis, belief in a sacred or timeless past that was knowable may have been more than metaphoric as well. He ended his Popular History with a curious, Mary Shelley–like refl ection on mythical time as it relates to cycles of death. In a section on the inventive genius of Americans, Ellis remarked: “Moreover it is the faith of many that the time is at hand when the most momentous of all discoveries that can bless mankind will be made—that is the scientifi c proof of immortality or a life beyond the grave.”108 Whether readers took Ellis seriously in his suggestions about the scientifi c pursuit of immortality, they did accept much of the presentism that conditioned his historical vision. The concept of a “sacred past” implied the importance of the contemporary moment, of a present which represents all time in distillation. If the human record has been consistent in purpose and meaning, then we should be able to extrapolate from “its current order” to “infer its past,” Stephen J. Gould has noted of this position.109 Sympathetic readers of the Popular History of the World recognized its contemporary fl avor and marveled at how Ellis was able to convey such “immense and varied information” about the past without losing his “perfect grasp of historical proportion and perspective” with respect to the present.110 They also appreciated his effort to give as much attention to current events as ancient ones, a commitment made explicit in the subtitle of the work: Including Complete Triumphs of the Nineteenth Century. No better evidence of this presentism exists than in the decisions Ellis made about the apportioning of space in the Popular History. In a book of 567 pages that aspired to tell the history of the entire world from beginning to end, Ellis devoted 301 pages to the United States, leaving only 188 pages for all other civilizations and nation-states. This compression reaffi rmed Ellis’s belief that the contemporary epoch must be the key to understanding the past, the present providing glimpses of the past in the manner of Merlin, who lived life backwards.111 Ellis’s search for “personal meaning and contemporary relevance” may have jeopardized his abilities to perceive “the ways in which people of the past differ from us,” as Mark Carnes has noted of other novelists-turned-historians, but they certainly appealed to those readers who shared his consolidating views.112 Ellis, of course, did not embrace the sacred past in its purest, solipsistic form; if he had, he could not have called himself a historian. Distilled to its

254 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 254254 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM essence, the sacred or timeless past is ahistorical insofar as its cyclical structure suggests that “nothing can be distinctive because everything comes round again—and no event, by itself, can tell us where we are, for nothing anchors us to any particular point in time, but only (at most) to a particular stage of a repeating cycle.” Why study in detail the distinctive elements of any specifi c event when it represents but “one of a potentially endless class?” Taken to its illogical extreme, Gould notes, such a position would require a denial of history, each event of the past appearing “so similar to its corresponding stage in the previous cycle that no criterion of history could be established.”113 This is one reason why Eliade associated the sacred past with archaic cultures. He believed that its ahistorical elements were most consistent with pre-literate conceptualizations of time as understood in such cultures. To the extent that archaic beings focused on the immediate needs of the present, time mattered little; “so long as our attention is concentrated on the present we tend to be unaware of time.” The “feeling or awareness of duration” that is associated with a “sense of time” emerges only when “the present situation is related by us either to our past experiences or to our future expectations and desires.” It is irrelevant to those who live in a “consistent present.” Not until beings refl ected consciously on the fact that they live and die like all creatures, not until they were led “intuitively to try to circumvent the relentless fl ux of time by seeking to perpetuate [their] own existence indefi nitely,” as G. J. Whitrow has noted, did history matter.114 Since at least antiquity, however, history has mattered, and time has come to be understood as “an abstract conceptual framework” that has been “constructed” from experience as a way of preserving memory. This “discovery of time,” to use Whitrow’s apt phrase, produced opportunities for those who sought to give expression to their consciousness of the passage of temporal phases through narratives structured by verbal tenses conveying a sense of past, present and future.115 History became subsequently “a sequence of particular events in time” which, “when considered in proper [order], tell a story of linked events moving in a direction.” Historians disagree over the precise trajectory of “time’s arrow,” as Gould referred to such linear history, but even Ellis recognized that duration (Bergson’s “la durée”) was at least as important an element in historical analysis as the study of the “present instant.” As we noted in our discussion of Eggleston and New History, by the end of the nineteenth century, historians gradually focused their attentions “on the historical process rather than on an eternally valid, unchanging order of things.” Inter- est simultaneously shifted “from the ‘thing completed’ to the genetic process, that is, from ‘being to becoming,’ ” and truth came to be regarded by many as no longer “eternal and changeless” but as “time-dependent” and fi xed.116 Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 255

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 255255 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM Although he embraced universal, timeless themes of a sacred past, therefore, Ellis organized his histories by distinct time-specifi c epochs. Ellis’s refl ections on linear time were infl uenced by the horological debates in the nineteenth century over the concept of the “long chronology”—that is, the recognition spurred on by research in the fi elds of geology and paleontol- ogy that human history did not begin a mere six thousand years before the twentieth century, as implied by the biblical or Mosaic chronology, but many thousands of years before that. This recognition had a dramatic impact on the way history was conceptualized by popularizers and scholars in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the rejection of an antediluvian view of the world for an archaeological one expanded dramatically the scale of human time: from a few thousand years to hundreds of thousands of years. As Thomas Trautmann has written, “[t]ime opened out indefi nitely backward” as a consequence of this discovery of “deep time”; in one sense, “we may truly say that the bottom dropped out of history,” demanding a recognition of the vastness of human experience.117 On the other hand, as a result of the long chronology, “ ‘[h]istory’ came to be understood, in a narrow sense, as a relatively recent and brief period of human time, defi ned in opposition to its newly discovered precursor: ‘prehistory.’ ” As Daniel Segal has noted, the use of prehistory as a periodizing device encouraged historians to view “historical time as both brief and entirely recent,” a “ ‘surveyable’ whole integrally attached to, rather than distant from, the present.” This construction of time caused some to believe that what had previously been called “ancient” history was really very contemporary history, relatively speaking. We share a great deal more in common with the ancients, the argument went, than we do with those preliterate, prehistorical humans who inhabited the Earth centuries before the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Hence, the concept of the long chronology ironically encouraged the collapsing of distinctions between time and place, “foreshortening . . . temporal perspective” and compressing the distances among periods of recorded human history when measured against the vast expanse of unrecorded time.118 Ellis’s popular historical writings refl ected the accordianlike effects of this expanding and contracting of time. As noted previously, Ellis believed in cyclical patterns of human experience and was predisposed to fi nd commonalities between the ancient and modern worlds. Yet as a novelist he was also accustomed to charting change over time, employing the trope of progress as a device for structuring the story of human history. The Popular History of the World, for instance, ended with ruminations on the “triumphs” of the nineteenth century in which the spirit of American invention refl ected the apotheosis of human in- novation as measured over time. He argued that “the increase of industrial production by the application of machinery” and “the improvement of old technical 256 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 256256 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM processes and the invention of new ones” formed “the most salient features of the world’s progress” over the past fi fty years, and he predicted that “we stand on the edge of the most astounding discoveries and inventions ever conceived by man.”119 The question was: how could Ellis’s conception of history be both “eternal and changeless” on the one hand and “time-dependent” and progressive on the other?120 At issue were differing conceptions of the meaning of time, especially the dichotomy between history understood as distinct moments of time in a temporal series with directionality, and history conceived of as nonlinear, characterized by events that have meaning not “as distinct episodes with causal impact upon a contingent history” but as “fundamental states,” “imma- nent in time, always present and never changing.” As Gould has noted, the distinction was the same as that between historian and novelist, between “distinct and irreversible events” and a “timeless order and lawlike structure.”121 One way historians at the turn of the century resolved this seeming paradox was to consider time three-dimensionally and to employ the geometric metaphor of a spiral to conceptualize change over time. By this logic, events cycle through predictable stages and demonstrate patterns of repetition, but such phases “repeat with crucial differences each time.” As Gould has noted with reference to geological time conceived as a coil, “the material substrate does not change (for the same stuff cycles), but resulting forms alter, often in a defi nite direction so that each repetition passes with distinctive and identifi able differences.” If we “impose a vector of history upon any set of cycles,” “guarantee- ing that no phase can repeat exactly the corresponding part of a former cycle,” then the concept of a unidirectional approach to the past (either progressive or regressive) can be reconciled with a belief in the universal experience of human history. The result is that histories such as Ellis’s “weave a subtle interplay between elements of repetition (to display order and plan), and strands of difference (to permit a recognizable history).”122 Ellis, the untrained historian, never articulated fully any scheme for the elucidation of the role of time in his novels or histories that approximated the complexity of Gould’s model, but there is evidence throughout the Popular History of the World that he did embrace the idea of a cyclical history corkscrewing through time. The development of France was described by Ellis as one big cycle of religious and class warfare, for instance, culminating at each turn of the metaphoric wheel in the same disturbing “series of massacres,” persecution and destruction. “France went backward” at times “when “intrigues, plotting and trouble were constant for years,” according to Ellis, and forward at others into a “new life.” But, in the end, the results were always the same. The “excitable” residents of this “mad republic” were “never wholly free from the danger of revolution,” he concluded, noting that, even at the time of the writing of the Popular History, France had narrowly Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 257

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 257257 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM averted a “new revolution” that would have left the streets once again “deluged with blood.” “As it is,” he suggested with telling pessimism, “no one can say” when “this catastrophe will again befall the country that has been so often torn by civil war,” only that “it will come.”123 Ellis’s readers did not comment on the “subtle interplay” between linear and cyclical models of time in the Popular History, nor did they care about the patterns of temporality embedded in any of his work. Most were more interested in its readability and its usefulness in terms of teaching the lessons of the past. Ellis’s training as a novelist was his most valued asset in this context. Ellis’s “language is clear and graphic” and his statements are “verifi ed by the highest authorities,” wrote one contemporary. “It has been said of his works that they possess the fascination of a novel,” the reviewer continued, “and when to this are added accuracy and the true dramatic instinct, it will be conceded that he possesses in pre-eminent degree the full equipment of the successful historian.”124 Others were less sure that “science-fi ction writers” such as Ellis or H. G. Wells could quality as “successful historian[s],” including most professional scholars who adopted Duyckinck’s strategy with respect to Lippard and Frost by choosing not to review Ellis’s works. Their professional principles simply could not accommodate so pedestrian a production. “It may seem that if a novelist can write the history of mankind a professor of history might venture to pronounce upon its merits in respect to scholarship and as a contribution to knowledge,” wrote Carl Becker. “Such is not the case” in practice, however, because scholars were constrained by rigid professional codes regarding what qualifi es as history and what does not. While the “man of letters may without reproach acquire a knowledge of general history,” Becker concluded, “the professor of history is not thus free.”125

Outside the Scope of History

After the publication of the Popular History of the World, Ellis wrestled for the remainder of his life with the implications of the distinctions between being a novelist and a historian and the dichotomies between time’s arrow and time’s cycle. The tensions that resulted were evident in The People’s Standard History of the United States (also published as The History of Our Country), a multivolume popular narrative of the development of the United States from the age of discovery to the late 1890s. The publishers approached Ellis with an offer to write the volumes as part of a home-study program, the latest in a series of efforts derived originally from Duyckinck’s Home Library to ﬁ nd new niches for their works. “Home Study broadens the mind, quickens the intellect, adds 258 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 258258 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM to and perfects the education, and is now very generally recognized as an invaluable aid to success in life,” the canvassing materials for the work proclaimed. In a declaration of educational independence that must have frightened National Education Association representatives, the publishers encouraged parents to stop relying for historical knowledge on the public schools that were failing them and to take up the “laudable work of home-education” as a responsible alternative. “[I]t is our ambition to produce educational series of highest value, and furnish them in such a convenient way as to place opportunity for home study in reach of every one,” they noted, adding that Ellis’s work was the “latest and greatest help to those seeking knowledge of their native land.” It was the “arrangement of the subject-matter” that was most noteworthy, the publishers argued, “it being the desire of the publishers to place the information before the reader in such a way as to make it easy to remember.”126 Sold by subscription, The People’s Standard History of the United States was directed at both scholarly audiences accustomed to linear views of history and popular ones disposed toward the cyclical. With regard to the former, the salesman’s dummy for the ﬁ rst 1896 edition included promotional material portraying Ellis as a researcher who had spent “years in collecting, sifting and verifying material for this work.” Readers were assured that “every page has been read carefully by historical authorities and pronounced correct” and that The People’s Standard History constituted “a complete record of the events that have brought our country to its present commanding position.”127 To those subscribers who suspected that the dime novel background of Ellis compromised his credentials as a historian, the author and publishers responded unequivocally that his material was grounded in solid fact and personal acquaintance with the material. With respect to concerns about the authenticity of his treatment of Native Americans, for instance, Ellis wrote: “Yes, I have seen and known a great many Indians, some good and some bad . . . I met a great many some years ago when in the Indian Territory and knew others.”128 The author “has personally discussed many of the incidents here recorded with statesmen and warriors,” added the publishers, “many of whom have had a prominent part in the making of the history of this country, thus proving the authenticity of each statement.”129 Ellis even presumed to correct the misstate- ments of other historians whose research he found wanting, including Sydney Howard Gay, whom he wrote personally concerning several inaccurate dates in Bryant’s Popular History of the United States.130 Ellis also demonstrated his commitment to traditional scholarship in The People’s Standard History by providing annotated comments at the beginning of each chapter in the text, complete with a bibliographic list of “authorities” consulted to establish the authority of his scholarly pronouncements. For those

Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 259

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 259259 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4712:58:47 PMPM Frontispiece from the salesman’s dummy for Ellis’s History of Our Country (released originally as The People’s Standard History of the United States).

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 260260 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 261261 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM uncomfortable with the topical approach he sometimes used, Ellis included a detailed chronological chart at the end of his last volume that established a precise time line of events. Throughout the text he cited books by respected professors of history at colleges and universities across the country as well as professional articles in the American Historical Review. Whenever topics of debate that scholars had not resolved presented themselves, Ellis tried to clarify details by citing sources that he had gathered or consulted that might shed light on the subject. In one instance in which confusion existed among the experts regarding whom to credit with an act of bravery at sea, Ellis wrote: “Since several persons have claimed this honor, it is well that it should be established beyond dispute,” and then provided the texts of several letters he had solicited from participants in the events clarifying matters. “In response to an inquiry the following letter was written” was a frequent notation in his volumes, and Ellis gathered evidence from as far away as Madrid, Spain, and Sydney, Australia, in order to establish that “there can be no question of the basis” of his claims.131 That said, Ellis resorted to literary practices and philosophical dispositions in The People’s Standard History that reminded readers he had not strayed far from his dime novelist roots. Salesmen’s dummies advertised Ellis as a storyteller by profession who aspired in his popular histories to more than as- sembling mere compendia of facts. Literary style and the packaging of ideas concerned him greatly. “That the text matter is written in a most fascinating manner, is acknowledged by all,” the promoters noted. “The reason for this lies in the extraordinary ability of Mr. Ellis as a writer of ﬁ ction. He has a reputation in this line second only to his ability as a historian, and has therefore a decided advantage over other writers. History reading is thus made a positive pleasure.” The publishers expected that the subscription or “magazine form” of The People’s Standard History would appeal “to the business man, club woman, student, child, and in fact, all who desire easy access to information on this subject. By the nature of its contents,” they added, “it is an encyclopedia, a geography, a treatise on political life and civil government; while its master- ful style and composition make it a most valuable aid to speaking and writing the English language correctly.”132 The introductory essay to the volumes also claimed that Ellis would present a vivid “historical tableau” based on the narrative successes of his earlier works, such as Stories from American History, in which he warned readers that no attempt was made “to give a connected or consecutive record, but rather [only] to relate a number of striking incidents and to arouse the desire for an acquaintance with the full story. . . .”133 The “authenticity” of Ellis’s accounts, derived from his personal association with the personages and events of history, in other words, also contributed to their idiosyncratic and highly personalized formats.

262 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 262262 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM Throughout the volumes of The People’s Standard History, Ellis reverted to the use of dime novel sensationalism when he felt his narrative was dragging. “[T]he ground[s] in each of the patches of woods and the clearing were strewn with dead bodies,” Ellis wrote in graphic detail of the Civil War battle of Bloody Lane. “The fi ghters could not always step over the inanimate forms, but were often forced to tread upon them where they lay two and three deep. Hundreds of the latter were not dead, but dying, and their shrieks, mingling with the crash of musketry, the roar of cannon, and the yells of the combatants made a din beyond the power of imagination to picture.” At Gettysburg, the “dead and dying” were everywhere, “in the wheat-fi eld, among the rocks, in the highways, on the open plain.” In ways that recalled the gratuitous death scenes in his western tales, Elllis noted how “[f]riend and foe alike” were found “side by side, with their glassy eyes staring at the blue sky, and the dusty ground steaming with their blood. Others, mangled and torn, shrieked for water and for some one to shoot and relieve them from their agony.” Reviving his old techniques for increasing in his readers a sense of participation in the past, he slipped into the present tense when describing Pickett’s charge. “With the precision of parade, Pickett’s division now moves forward in three lines upon its great charge against the Union intrenchments,” he narrated. “It leaves several hundred dead upon the ground as its lines re-form, and others are so prostrated by the excessive heat that they cannot rise to their feet.” In these and in other such descriptions of American military confl icts, Ellis sought to produce “a quickening of the pulse and a tingling of the blood” among readers who had grown complacent to the stirring and disturbing realities of war.134 As he had been in the Popular History of the World, Ellis was casual and nonscholarly in his treatment of time in The People’s Standard History, jump- ing back and forth across centuries in ways that threatened temporal order. In the former work, Ellis had asked readers to imagine what the reaction of George Washington would have been to the knowledge on his deathbed that “there would be persons then born who would live to see people whirled across the country at a rate of seventy miles an hour.” The fi rst president would have “pit- ied the madmen who uttered the wild prophecies” in such an anachronistic manner, he concluded.135 In the latter history, Ellis evoked Washington again in the context of the popular pastime of baseball in ways that refl ected more on the ageless elements of the game than on the timelessness of the man. Washington was “so honest,” Ellis wrote of the colonial hero, “that when the other boys got into a dispute they appealed to him to settle it, and every one was satisfi ed, for whatever he said was right. The game of base-ball was unknown in those days,” he added, using an improbable anachronistic analogy. “[T]herefore one cannot be quite sure that there might not have been a situation in which the youth Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 263

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 263263 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM could be placed where his decisions would not always have given satisfaction.” Ellis also developed historical analogies that collapsed the distinctions of time and place in favor of the universality of human experience. “Once more it is Greek against Greek,” Ellis wrote of the battle of Gettysburg as an epic struggle with Olympian ramifi cations for the American people. On refl ection, he noted, it was more the “Waterloo of the Confederacy.” An engineering feat accomplished by Union forces during the Red River Expedition reminded Ellis “of the triumph of the engineer who baffl ed for so long the attack of the Romans under Marcellus, during the siege of Syracuse.” General George H. Thomas of the North was a contemporary “Cincinnatus, the grim old commander of the Roman legions,” while McClellan was a “modern Fabius” because of his “do-nothing tactics.” Henry Ward Beecher’s orations were “the Philippies of Demosthenes,” and Andrew Jackson was “as much of an autocrat . . . as is the Czar of Russia to-day.”136 Ellis revealed as well a popularizer’s tendency to fi xate on an eternal present. Operating from the relativistic theory that the present instant represents all time in distillation and assuming that readers were more interested in the immediate world around them than the ancient past, Ellis focused a disproportionate amount of his narrative on current events. After cramming the entire colonial period and the history of the Revolution in the fi rst two volumes of the eight- volume edition of The People’s Standard History, for instance, the popular historian allotted three volumes to the telling of the story of the last seventeen years of American history. In fact, the last two and a half volumes were given over exclusively to the McKinley administration, barely two years old when the volumes went to press. This apportioning of space in favor of the contemporary moment refl ected a general trend among popular historians of focusing on the “here and now” of national experience as well as a particular fi xation of Ellis’s, who regretted that few historians of the United States extended their narratives much beyond the Centennial Celebrations of 1876.137 George Bancroft had written “a magnifi cent library” of “incalculable value to students of the history of our country,” Ellis noted, but its primary defect was that “it stops before reaching our modern stage of development.”138 Gay had mistimed his work and ignored the contemporary moment entirely. Determined in response to carry his story through to the present moment, Ellis was vulnerable to the criticism that suffi cient time had not passed for him to render balanced judgments or to establish critical distance and objectivity. Reviewer Edwin E. Sparks argued that the “perspective is bad” in the series, “nearly three” of the volumes “being given to the Civil War and one to the Spanish-American War” while the “political and social evolution of the people” was “scarcely touched.” Ellis believed, however, that contemporary things mattered more than ancient historical ones 264 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 264264 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM to the popular audiences he wished to reach, and he thus dismissed charges such as Sparks’s that he had violated rules of “modern investigation” with regard to proportionality of material.139 The effect of this telescoping of history was to emphasize the relevance of contemporary issues for readers already predisposed to favor personal experience over disembodied facts. More than most audiences, readers of popular literature wished to ﬁ nd evidence of themselves in the books they purchased, and Ellis understood perfectly the economic value of a relativistic philosophy that focused on the present needs of the contemporary reader. Anticipating by several decades Carl Becker’s essay “Everyman His Own Historian,” Ellis suggested that understanding history required no special status on the part of observers other than a sensitivity to the world around them and an ability to read back into the past those lessons suggested by the present. Just as each age reinterprets the past to suit its purposes, so every individual must view history in light of his or her own present circumstances, Becker noted. In this sense all history is “contemporaneous” because it emerges from our “individual experience” and adapts to our personal needs.140 “It goes without saying” that popular historians such as Ellis were not “in the conventional sense, objective,” Becker added, since they had “a very special, even a personal, interest in the past.” Eschewing “that cosmic point of view which reduced Henry Adams to the cold comfort of a mechanical formula,” popular historians understood that “the last three thousand years of human history are more worthy of our attention than the preceding three hundred and forty-seven thousand, for the simple reason that they are ‘more interesting to us.’ ” History for Ellis was “an attempt to tell how our present state of affairs, this distressed and multifarious human life about us, arose in the course of vast ages and out of the inanimate clash of matter, and to estimate the quality and amount and range of the hopes with which it now faces its destiny.”141 The People’s Standard History of the United States was structured and marketed as the kind of work that would allow average readers to appreciate the “specious present” by encouraging them, as James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard urged, to “catch up with [their] own times” and to “read intelligently the foreign news in the morning paper.”142 A large segment of the sixth volume of the series was devoted exclusively to narrating the history of labor strife in America in the 1880s, for instance, a subject the publisher, the Jones Brothers of Cincinnati, believed would be of interest to the “immense numbers of persons who naturally feel a sympathy with poor men struggling to better their condition.”143 After reciting at length the details of the Pullman, Homestead, and a dozen other strikes, Ellis jumped quickly to presentist assumptions concerning the relevance of these descriptions for middle class

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 265265 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM readers, many of whom, he presumed, had been affected directly by the incidents. The history of labor in America is “calculated to arouse sympathy for the workingmen, and some anxiety for the stability of the government,” Ellis noted, because too often “men are given rank according to the amount of material wealth they may possess without taking into consideration their moral and mental equipment, and the means by which they have gained their wealth.” Labor unions, therefore, “have proved of immense value to their members, and to the general public.” Unfortunately, Ellis editorialized, “the workingmen are frequently ill advised and misled and taken advantage of by ignorant or unscrupulous demagogues within and without their own ranks” who are “very apt to engage as their leader the noisy, ignorant, blatant demagogue, who in any game of diplomacy can be outwitted by a man of affairs.” Ellis’s conclusion was that such leaders discredited unions with their despicable behavior, and he urged readers to view their own circumstances as confi rmation of that fact.144 Confl ating the past with the present in highly personalized ways, Ellis was not averse to presenting subjective views on contemporary matters under the guise of general or popular history. The politics of immigration and the rise of labor unions were two of his special concerns. “The right to strike is as clear as the right to breathe,” Ellis argued, “but the wrong is committed when the strikers, as is nearly always the case, use violence to prevent others from taking their places. Not only that, but they pillage and destroy property, and some of the desperate persons among them (quite often criminals who are the worst enemies of the strikers) commit atrocious misdeeds.” Such was true especially for the Pullman Strike which provided Ellis with an opportunity to restate his opinions on immigration policy fi rst presented in the Youth’s History of the United States. Threatened by “the thousands that fl ock to our shores” representing “the very dregs of society in the Old World,” Ellis disliked especially the “Anarchists, who scoff at religion and the most sacred of ordinances, and whose aim in life is to destroy existing governments by means of violence and murder.” They are the “rabble of Europe,” he noted, who “come here, not with the intention of becoming good, law-abiding citizens of our republic, but to breed discontent among our workingmen and to reap advantage from the dissensions that result from their mischievous propaganda.”145 Arguing that Americans have been too generous in conferring the “elective franchise” on such peoples, Ellis added: “It was seen that the mobs were composed of foreigners—not those that had spent several years in the country and had become Americans in sentiment (and they include many of our best citizens), but ignorant, brutal aliens, the dregs of Europe, hardly able to speak the English language. They were the tools of demagogues, who, like the pestilent carpet-baggers of the South, were eager to adopt any means that promised them personal advantage.”146 266 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 266266 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM Such ethnocentric pronouncements revealed how fully Ellis shared in the prevalent stereotypes of his age; they also suggested the extent to which he practiced what he preached with respect to historical methodology. His outspoken comments on matters of ethnicity and race shared by so many at the end of the nineteenth century were vivid demonstrations of his subjectivizing philosophy in action. It was the historian’s obligation to declaim, Ellis argued, and declaim he did. Italians encouraged the abuses of the ancient order of the Mafi a, that “atrocious band” which “includes assassins who do not hesitate to take the lives of those whom they dislike,” he noted. The Chinese were “a peculiar people,” “yellow Asiatics” who “began swarming across the Pacifi c to California in such multitudes that the people became alarmed.” They were “barbarians” of a primitive age, obsolete members of an “inferior race,” whose “degraded and vicious” nature “is proved by a visit to ‘Chinatown’ in San Fran- cisco, and the Chinese quarters in other cities.” Races such as the “Aborigines of Peru and Mexico” or the “negro population” fared little better. They demonstrated the ancient law that “an inferior civilization coming into contact with a civilization that is superior is destroyed,” he wrote. If ontology recapitulated phylogeny, to cite a famous dictum of the day, then these races were doomed in Ellis’s estimation. Citing the celebrated phrase of Spencer that Ridpath had put to good use—“the survival of the fi ttest”—Ellis argued that there could be no relief from the inexorable law by which such peoples were eclipsed by time. For these races, there were “no new lessons to be learned,” he quoted an eminent scholar in the fi eld, “but only confi rmation of some that are very old.”147 Presentism also infl uenced the way Ellis treated these groups as historical entities in his works. The binary distinction implicit in the long chronology between prehistory and history encouraged him to assume that either peoples met the qualifi cations of the standards of the present or they were outside the scope of time. Ellis was sympathetic toward Native Americans, for instance, and reminded readers that “much of the Indian blood spilled on this continent was due to the coming of the white man, who was the intruder and the invader of the homes and the hunting-grounds of the native races.” Some tribes, especially the Cherokee, had made the effort to “civilize” themselves. That said, Ellis also recognized that many “portions of the [Indian] race” had “lapse[d] into barbarism,” the typical Native American showing little hope of “eradicat[ing] from his nature those dispositions and tendencies that drag him backward.”148 Ellis acknowledged that an exhibit at the Omaha Exposition of 1898 contrasted “[r]elics of the prehistoric people” with “the printing-presses and newspapers of the modern Indian,” but in general he portrayed Native Americans as members of a doomed race incapable of making the full transition to civilization. Dan- iel Segal notes that “primitive peoples” are often depicted in popular histories Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 267

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 267267 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4812:58:48 PMPM such as Ellis’s as “arrested in time, frozen vestiges of prehistory operating in history.” Native Americans like the hunter-gatherers described in The People’s Standard History are “fi gured as remains of ‘prehistory,’ rather than as living in ‘history.’ ” Such an approach, Segal notes, is “profoundly ahistorical” since “distributing coeval human beings to different segments of a vast time line masks the interaction between, say, twentieth-century states and twentieth- century forms of hunting and gathering.”149 Ahistorical approaches to racial and ethnic concerns were also evident in Ellis’s treatment of the most signifi cant contemporary problem of his day—the Spanish-American War. Referring to its struggle for independence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ellis noted that “Cuba was making history fast,” a phrasing that revealed how accelerated and contemporaneous his perspective was with regard to the passage of time.150 In 1896, when the fi rst edition of The People’s Standard History was published, war had not been declared offi cially, although the struggle for Cuban independence was waging. Ellis, who was strongly in favor of intervention in the war, argued in opposition to other popular historians such as Edward Eggleston of the Anti-Imperial League. In an 1896 piece titled “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider,” Ellis warned newly elected President McKinley that Spain would provoke a war with America eventually, and that there could be but one result: “She will receive the most complete and overwhelming trouncing that one nation ever infl icted upon another, and Cuba will become independent, to be followed at no distant day by her absorption into the great American Union.”151 Associat- ing the Spanish with those primitive and irrelevant peoples who belonged to prehistory, Ellis argued that “Spain has been a blight and a curse wherever she placed her hand in the Western hemisphere; she has been rapacious, brutal to the last degree, treacherous, and as merciless to honorable foes as she was to the poor natives themselves. Fire, the sword, blood, and outrage followed in her footsteps from the days of the brutal Menendez, founder of St. Augustine, until the present hour, when she is putting forth every possible effort to subdue the uprising in Cuba.”152 In the 1899 edition of The People’s Standard History, published just after the Spanish-American War had concluded, Ellis was even more outspoken about the Spanish peoples whom he found “so wily, so adroit, and so treacherous.” Drawing on accounts of the war he pieced together from recent newspapers and from his personal recollections, Ellis used the present tense in his description of the confl ict not only to give readers a sense of participation in the struggle but also to emphasize the importance of the contemporary in historical assessments. Sometimes this proved anachronistic, such as when he failed to update a passage from the 1896 edition in which he spoke of the 268 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 268268 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM “inevitable end in sight” to a war that had concluded months earlier. Or, on another occasion, Ellis hinted at his special clairvoyance by claiming that the independence of Porto Rico (secured before the publication of the 1899 edition of the work had been issued) was a “momentous” event, “which, to all intelligent men [such as himself, presumably], was foreseen from the beginning.” Ellis acknowledged that the rules of historical engagement required some balance, although he was never willing to relinquish too many of his subjective opinions. “It would be idle to deny that we Americans have a tendency to boastfulness and that at times the spirit passes the limits of good taste and possibly of strict taste,” he admitted; “but, on the other hand, there is ground for the claim that we boast because the facts warrant us in doing so.” The War was “an impressive illustration of the superiority of the Anglo- Saxon over the Latin race, and one of the many unerring indications of the ‘manifest destiny’ of America,” he concluded in a manner that would have made even the Young Americans blush.153 As this anti-Spain, pro-war stance suggests, Ellis was not afraid to speak out on behalf of present initiatives when he felt the historical record bore out their signiﬁ cance. He also advocated for partisan causes. Reform activities were nothing new for popular historians, as we have seen; indeed, Irving, Frost, Gay, Ridpath, and Eggleston all had their causes. Ellis’s campaigns were different from the actions of these others, however, insofar as they reconceived of history as the handmaiden of reform. That is, Ellis favored a model of history that employed the concerns of the present as the standard for evaluating what was useful not just in the past but in the future. The present did not need “to conform to the structures of the past,” Novick has written of this outlook, so much as the past was required to meet the demands of the contemporary moment and beyond. Put more simply, “history existed for man, not man for history.”154 This inversion of the relationship between things that had transpired and things that were yet to come represented a truly Copernican revolution in historical consciousness and signaled the emergence of a future-mindedness that has been central to the modernist vision ever since. The historian’s social responsibility was to provide an account of the past appropriate to society’s current and future needs, Ellis believed. As Hayden White put it, history’s task is “less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future.”155 There was something opportunistic in this thinking that borrowed from the “pragmatic revolt” of the new century.156 In James Harvey Robinson’s words, “the present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interest of advance.”157

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 269269 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM The physical design of Ellis’s volumes recapitulated these presentist themes. Though The People’s Standard History contained some pictorial reproduc- tions of hand-drawn images, they were primarily illustrated by hundreds of photographs of contemporary events taken on location. Ellis’s treatment of the Spanish-American War was supplemented by dozens of camera-generated images of Cuban life before and after the confl ict, for instance, including photographs of coconut plantations and Catholic cathedrals, of country villas and crude village huts, of American soldiers embarking on battleships and Cuban blockhouses.158 New technologies of photographic duplication allowed for easier transfer of camera images to books and increased their documentary capacity as eyewitness accounts of the present moment. For those who were inclined to think that traditional visual art had done little to aid in the historian’s mission of recording the past “as it had actually occurred,” photography seemed to promise immediacy and accuracy. In the Portfolio of the World’s Photographs, John C. Ridpath declared that wherever physical limitations had made it diffi cult for citizens to experience places or events, “there the lens, with its quick fl ash of light and swiftly-caught image of nature and the work of man, has come to supply the defi ciency and to transmit to humble homes in distant lands the picture and vision of the reality.” In Ridpath’s estimation, photographs like those employed by Ellis in his volumes were useful instruments for collapsing not only geographic distances but temporal ones. Through the agency of photographs, he noted, “the memory is traced with indelible images, and the imagination is lifted and borne away across continents and oceans. With the picture before us time and space are suddenly obliterated.”159 This logic of shattering temporal boundaries encouraged Ellis to contextualize the present and the future with respect to the “vastness of human time.” Historians, he believed, must not become so fi xated on the minutia of the past as to lose sight of the glaring imperatives of the present and indicators of the future.160 “The adjustment of the past, present, and future to each other—the historian’s response to life’s demand for a balance between change and continuity,” Ernst Breisach has said of the position, “must no longer be accomplished on terms giving overwhelming weight to the past, lest the millennia of the past immobilize life under an ‘arch of permanency.’ ” The new historiography of popular history “had to be present-minded and future-oriented, and reject the centuries-old habit of giving the past the key to continuity.” Ellis found support for this contention in the works of another novelist-turned- historian, the “English prophet of progress,” H. G. Wells, whose Outline of History distinguished two types of mind: “The dominant and outdated one [that] ‘interprets the things of the present, and gives value to this and denies it to that, entirely with relations to the past,’ ” and “the other and proper one 270 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 270270 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM [that] does so ‘in relation to things designed or foreseen.’ ” The British popularizer “assured all historians that they no longer needed to trouble themselves with capturing the past in complete accounts in order to inform the present or to make the present conform to the structures of the past.” He argued that “in historiography recent periods must get priority over earlier ones, not just for the technical reason that the sources for them were more abundant and reliable, but because progress allotted them the attribute ‘better.’ ”161 All of this contributed to a new interest among popular historians in organizational schemes that focused attention on the present and future. Popu- larizers like Ellis viewed history pragmatically, not as a series of cautionary tales whose lessons readers were doomed to repeat, but as opportunities for providing insights into how historians might engineer for the future. Robinson explained such inverted thinking this way: “Could we suddenly be endowed with a Godlike and exhaustive knowledge of the whole history of mankind, far more complete than the combined knowledge of all the histories ever written, we should gain forthwith a Godlike appreciation of the world in which we live, and a Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suffers, as well as into the most promising methods for alleviating them, not because the past would furnish precedents of conduct, but because our conduct would be based upon a perfect comprehension of existing conditions founded upon a perfect knowledge of the past,” he wrote. Recognizing that most historians “have not as yet set themselves to furnish us with what lies behind our great contemporaneous task of human betterment,” Robinson noted that were his professional colleagues “asked to furnish answers to the questions that a person au courant with the problems of the day would most naturally put to them, they would with one accord begin to make excuses.” The books such scholars of history produce, he concluded, “are like very bad memories which insist upon recall- ing facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical value of history has so long been obscured.” Urging readers to develop a sense of historical-mindedness about present conditions, he recognized that the part they could play “in forwarding some phase of this reform” was dependent upon their “understanding of existing conditions and opinion,” which could only be explained “by following more or less carefully the processes that produced them.”162 Even as Ellis acknowledged in the pages of The People’s Standard History that “it is a wild venture to speculate about what shall be a hundred or even ﬁ fty years in advance,” he could not resist putting his futuristic philosophy of history into practice. “No student of American history can fail to glance ahead and wonder what the future has in store for us,” he wrote, making predictions about the future of the “art of navigating in the air, the substitution of electricity as Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 271

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 271271 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM the universal motor, the doubling and tripling of speed by railways and steamboats, absolute safety against fi re, a specifi c [cure] for every disease . . . and the consequent lengthening of human life.” Ellis suggested that in “no distant day” there would be one hundred states and one billion people in the United States and that fortunate American citizens would experience “the most astounding discoveries that will affect civilization throughout the coming ages.” He was especially taken with Edison’s plans for developing an “engine of war” capable of shooting a fl uid 600 feet through which an electrical current could be passed, killing “with the quickness of lightening all whom a drop touched.” The perverse invention seemed more worthy of Johnny Brainerd in The Huge Hunter than Edison, but its signifi cance for the future of humankind was what recommended it to Ellis. “Awful as all this seems,” he wrote, “the benefi cent result would be in the end to make war so destructive to life, that no nation or people would dare to go to war” again. Ellis’s hope was, therefore, that Edison would “live to perfect his stupendous inventions, and thus usher in the day of universal arbitration and universal peace” when the “means for human destruction will become so effective as to render war only national folly.”163 At times Ellis tortured himself and his readers with pessimistic visions of a future that partook of some of the dark undertones of modernism. He warned especially of the dangers of class warfare, the disregard of law, the miscarriage of justice for which there were no foreseeable solutions. He argued that the Chicago fi re of 1873 was the result not of an involuntary twitch of the leg by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow but was deliberately set—a confl agration which served as “a good illustration that notwithstanding our pretenses of an advanced civilization, society is still infested with human cormorants and hyenas lying in wait to prey upon suffering humanity.” He acknowledged also that there was a disturbing “periodicity about ‘panics’ that suggests a discouraging truth to those optimistic thinkers who sigh for an acceleration of human progress.” Worse than the linear regression implied by this metaphoric spiraling downward was the prospect that the modern world would submit to no laws at all. “[A]s conditions are now, nothing is constant,” Ellis wrote in a pessimistic moment worthy of Eggleston. “The fact is, that in all matters relating to social and industrial relations, nothing is stable. What the public applauds to-day, it execrates to-morrow; the idol it worships now, in a brief time it insists upon crucifying. Nature’s processes for improving the condition of the race are slow,—exasperatingly so to the optimist,” Ellis told readers. The promises of the future cannot be realized “if we fall short of our duty. There have been crucial periods in the past, when our country tottered on the verge of destruction, and doubtless such crises will confront us in the future,” he warned.164 272 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 272272 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM More often, however, Ellis was optimistic about the future as projected in the pages of The People’s Standard History. “Standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, looking back over the past with all its grandeur of achievement, surpassing the vision of the prophet, and casting his eye of faith toward the future, whose sunburst reveals glimpses of the marvelous destiny of Amer- ica in civilizing and Christianizing the world,” Ellis wrote in purple prose worthy of Irving, “we can but imitate the naval hero in front of Santiago, and, bowing our heads, hold our lips mute while our hearts overfl ow with thankful- ness and gratitude to Almighty God.”165 The key was to prevent the past from incapacitating the present or from restricting reform efforts in the future. “The call for historians to be activists increased a tendency latent in the progressive philosophy of history, using progress as the criterion, to see most problems in history in terms of a grand moral struggle between the forces of good (the future) and evil (the past),” Ernst Breisach has written.166 The remedy for pre- venting the contamination of the future by the dangers of the past, Ellis noted toward the end of his popular history, “lies in the cultivation of the minds and hearts of our children, that they grow up with their sense of right clarifi ed and duty made the mainspring of all their actions.” Those were goals that even the Committee of Ten and the NEA could endorse. Ellis’s additional suggestion that the “history of the United States should be familiar to every boy and girl, and not only the achievements but the mistakes of the past made clear” also would have pleased committee members, although some might have seen in it a shameless form of self-promotion for The People’s Standard History itself.167 Readers seemed to appreciate Ellis’s efforts to resolve the paradox of “time’s cycle” versus “time’s arrow” in an optimistic vein. To be sure, a few thought Ellis’s predictions for the future were more science fi ction than reality-based, and they found too many convergences between his dime novels and his histories to justify confi dence in the predictions made in The People’s Standard His- tory of the United States. The reviewer for the New York Times was more typical in his comments, however, when he noted that “[t]his is indeed a history written for all classes of readers.” Claiming that the author “knows exactly where to put the emphasis,” the reviewer appreciated especially the “contemporaneous” fl avor of the history.”168 An advertisement by the Loeser History Club, which had selected Ellis’s volumes for its list, confi rmed that it was the present-mindedness of The People’s Standard History that attracted readers. “The opening sale last Monday of this monumental work has been more than gratifying, and proves that you’ve only to glance at this sumptuous set of books to appreciate what such an offer really means,” the publisher noted. “It is the best and only Complete Authentic History of our Country” with a narrative that “carries you down to the very close of the Spanish-American War.” Simply written and “as Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 273

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 273273 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM easy to read as a story,” Ellis’s popular history was billed as “an education in itself; a building up of character and sure to add to life’s successes.” There was, its promoters suggested with optimism, “nothing published to equal it.”169

Profane Time

Professional historians who generally ignored the pronouncements of popular historians such as Ellis took some note of the relativism implicit in his works. By the turn of the twentieth century, scholars within the Ameri- can Historical Association had divided on the question of the role historians should play in making history the handmaiden of reform. Some, such as James Harvey Robinson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Charles Beard, were affi liated with a group of “progressive historians” who believed that history should be used as a tool for the advancement of reform agendas.170 Eschewing the detached objectivity of their elders within the profession, these civic-minded historians scoured the past to fi nd precedents that could justify (rather than merely explain) progressive policies. In his 1910 presidential address before the AHA, Turner acknowledged that younger historians were justifi ably “on the point of rebellion against the traditional interpretation of the past” because they recognized the urgent need to convert history “into an instrument for the transformation of society.” History is “not planted on the solid ground of fi xed condition,” Turner noted, but must be reworked again and again “from the new points of view afforded by the present.”171 Carl Becker agreed, noting in his essay “Detachment and the Writing of History” (1910) that “objectivists” within the historical profession—those who insisted that the historians must disavow any practical intentions for their work—were ignoring the subjective components implicit in all historical memory. In making the assumption that a historian should or even could “separate himself from the process which he describes,” Becker argued, professionals were losing sight of the relativity of all knowledge. He called for a new attitude toward history of which Ellis would have approved, a philosophy that recognized the responsibility of the historian to rewrite the past according to current social needs.172 As a result of the efforts of these “young Turks” within the profession, some scholars were encouraged to demonstrate their commitments to the kinds of causes that had preoccupied popularizers. Ellis, Turner, and Becker were inching their way toward the concept of a “usable past,” an idea fully articulated a decade later by Van Wyck Brooks in a provocative essay, “On Creating a Us- able Past” (1918). A usable past was one in which historians assumed a more active role in current affairs and sought not detachment but deeply personal 274 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 274274 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM involvement with the issues they were treating. The presentism implicit in such an outlook came dangerously close to the “shadowy something” of the imagination against which Albert Bushnell Hart had warned, but it was consistent with the psychologizing elements at the heart of Eggleston’s New History, which focused on the immediate needs of the historical viewer. Importantly, Brooks, an amateur historian, wrote his essay not only to highlight the value of such a utilitarian outlook but to make distinctions between the popular historians who embraced it commonly and the professional historians who did not with regularity. He argued that professional historians were too dependent on universities whose funding encouraged them to produce dull monographs on specialized and self-serving topics, making little allowance for “clarity and pun- gency of expression.” Popularizers were better suited to aid readers in making history useful in their lives, he suggested, because they had no illusions about the objectivity of a single past. Brooks even reintroduced a form of subjectivism into the discussion, reminding readers that history was a product of the imagination and had no ontological signifi cance outside the perceiver’s mind. For Brooks, history was a creative act subject to constant revision depending on the perspective of the historian. If the history “our professors offer us is too sterile and unusable,” Brooks wrote, then the “past should be rewritten. . . . If we need another past so badly,” he added, “is it not conceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?” Although that notion of “inventing” the past made many professional historians nervous (what, they justifi ably asked, separated historians from writers of historical fi ction?), Brooks’s radically subjective vision convinced some to expand their conceptions of what qualifi ed as important for the study of history.173 The logic of relativism evidenced in Ellis’s fi ction and histories and justifi ed in Brooks’s essay terrifi ed many, however. Skeptical scholars feared that the progressive agenda was too politicized, too subjective to be compatible with the objective, fact-fi nding mission of history. As Hart explained, they believed that it is “the duty of a sober and studious body like the American Historical Association to dwell upon the strictly scientifi c character of history; to emphasize the fi xed principles of research, to warn the world against the consequences of unsound study and writing of history. The remedy is a matter of method and process and point of view.” The historian “has nothing to do with abstract truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts of the future,” Hart added. “Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tells his story well, it will need none; if he tells it ill, it will deserve none.”174 Historian H. B. Learned echoed Hart’s assessments of the dangers of presentism in a critical review of William H. Mace’s manual Method in His- tory for Teachers and Students (1898). Learned rejected Mace’s claim that the

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 275275 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:4912:58:49 PMPM “structures with which the historian of institutions may concern himself are the systems or numerous organizations in the state which give to any country its organic unity and serve by their continuous existence to bind the past to the present.” History should exist for its own sake, Learned noted, and not for the benefi t of some Wellsian futuristic fantasy. “The true safe-guard for the teacher who reads the volume is his or her own interest in things simply because they were,” he wrote.175 Even Carl Becker, the holy man of relativism, “confessed that Wells’s ‘new history’ was too new for his tastes, too insistent upon judging the past by the standards of the present—or rather by Wells’s vision of the future, when the ‘Great Society,’ the ‘Federal World State,’ would have ushered in a truly democratic and universal era.”176 These criticisms anticipated Herbert Butterfi eld’s famous attack on presentism as a “whiggish” contrivance in the Whig Interpretation of History. In Butterfi eld’s estimation, history should not be utilitarian; nor should it serve present purposes. “The sin in historical composition . . . is to abstract events from their context and set them up in implied comparison with the present day, and then to pretend that by this ‘the facts’ are being allowed to ‘speak for themselves,’ ” he wrote. “It is to imagine that history as such . . . can give judgments of value—to assume that this ideal or that person can be proved to have been wrong by the mere lapse of time.” To the extent that history is thought to be value-laden, in other words, it reveals its fi ctional or contrived character. Butterfi eld added that relativism constitutes “the very sum and defi nition of all errors of historical inference. The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.”177 If historical events are viewed solely as “the origin or precursor or anticipation of the present,” he concluded, then they have a dependency on the present that compromises their integrity as discrete episodes worth studying in their own right.178 More recently David Lowenthal has spoken in rejection of “a past that mirrors the present and that should be read back from it, refl ecting eternal and universal causes, virtues, and vices.”179 One of Ellis’s rivals in the Ameri- can history book market, Edward Channing, had articulated a similar position decades earlier. The “inhabitants of the historical landscape” should not be “subject to higher, present standards,” Channing wrote. To estimate past fi g- ures “by the conditions and ideas of the present day” would not only “do them an injustice” but would discredit those in the present as well.180 In questioning presentism, scholars advanced a concept of “profane time” that emphasized “a scrupulous regard for the historicity, the integrity, the actuality of the past.”181 According to Eliade, such anti-relativists dismissed constructions of the past that encouraged “man’s refusal to accept himself as a historical being,” that is, “his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to

276 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 276276 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM the unusual events (i.e. events without an archetypal model) that in fact constitute concrete duration.” They guarded simultaneously against the presentist impulse to reduce life to a series of endlessly repeating “archetypal acts.”182 Instead professional historians focused on discrete events that demonstrated the “irreversibility” of time. Believing that “time moves inexorably forward” without script and “that one truly cannot step twice into the same river,” such scholars valued uniqueness over timeless principles.”183 Their understanding of time was Darwinian insofar as it advanced the concept of a “truly contingent history,” envisioning the past as a “a quirky sequence of intricate, unique, unre- peatable events linked in a unidirectional chain of complex causes (and gobs of randomness).”184 According to this thinking, history was no more valuable for what it revealed about universal tendencies than was the evolutionary record of an extinct species in disclosing the ultimate plan of the universe. We analyze the life history of a defunct species for what it tells us about the unique characteristics and traits of extinct creatures, not for what it tells us about ourselves in the present. By the same logic, scholars urged a truly historicized approach to the past in which events are studied not with respect to their relationship to archetypal forms but for what they can reveal about a past that is now lost to us. History must always remain a bifurcated enterprise. Admittedly, this “history for history’s sake” argument was stark and unnerving to many for what it suggested about the capriciousness of history. The ge- ologist Charles Lyell noted that “[s]uch views of the immensity of past time, like those unfolded by the Newtonian philosophy in regard to space, were too vast to awaken ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such inﬁ nite extent.”185 If history is “just history,” and if events “cannot arise again,” then the entire metaphysical underpinning of the discipline as practiced since the beginnings of recorded time was threatened.186 Even some professionals found this too pessimistic, although supporters argued that the divorce of history from metaphysics meant that the past could have “an integrity and will of its own” and that the “inviolable pastness of the past” could be respected above the usurping habits of the present. Real scholars demonstrate their “true love of the past, a past that is all the more [sanctiﬁ ed] because it is untainted by the present and the practical,” Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted. They reject the sacrilegious impulse to try to “recall it to life again.” The attempts of popularizers such as Ellis to raise the events of the past from the dead, Lazarus-like, and to insist that history serve the needs of the present, showed “neither love nor respect for what is dead” in her estimation.187 The problems of living in a present in which “the past weighs on the characters, corrupting their lives and subverting their destinies” were of special concern to professional scholars at the turn of the twentieth century who wished to reduce their

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 277277 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM obligations to the past by distancing themselves from its burdens in the present. Fear of the rule of mortmain—that is, the hand of the dead controlling the living—compelled them to characterize the past as an “alienating and destructive force” imposed on the present in unnatural and inappropriate ways.188 Rejection of the presentist implications of history also allowed scholars to free themselves from the deterministic grip that “progress” had held on the imaginations of popular historians throughout the nineteenth century. Much of the era’s faith in progressive historiography emerged as a response to the unpredictability of the modern moment. “Whatever the defi ciencies of bygone times, they possess the supreme advantage of lacking the uncertainty of the present, because they are over,” David Lowenthal has noted. “We can relive the past as a more satisfactory narrative because it is one that is completed.” Given the “chaos or imprecision” of the contemporary moment, which historians are helpless to direct, they seek a compensatory control over the past by insisting that it conform to a rational shape. In so doing, “they themselves are partly responsible for confi rming, if not generating, the illusion that the past has a pattern.”189 No longer concerned with trying to “impose an artifi cial unity upon either history or society,” however, professionals recognized that there was no absolute necessity associated with progress as a theme in history, that it was but a convenient metaphor, “a literary term to emphasize its divorce from reality.” The historian “knows no general causes that are the necessary and suffi cient causes of war; he knows only the particular course of events which made a particular war not accidental and not inevitable but simply ‘intelligible,’ ” Himmel- farb notes. “Nor is the historian’s attitude truly contemplative, although it may sometimes appear to be so. For the historian, unlike the historical novelist, sees past events as ‘facts’ rather than as mere ‘images.’ ” Fiction writers such as Ellis had a regrettable “contempt for the specifi c and the concrete,” extrapolating inappropriately from “particular events” that should “properly be explained only in particularistic terms” to grand strategies for treating “social problems” that should “be alleviated only by small, pragmatic, incremental reforms”—that is, by Eggleston’s “partial, contingent, and incremental truths.”190 The effect of all this was to encourage more conservative professionals to create an intellectual buffer in their works between the present and the past. Since “recent history cannot be adequately written,” and since “we can never hope to bring the past into relation with the present,” Robinson argued, the scholar “must always leave a fi tting interval between ourselves and the nearest point to which the historian should venture to extend his researches.”191 Main- taining a separation between the past and the present also allowed professionals to avoid the “relativist’s dilemma,” a philosophical conundrum that often plagued those like Ellis who advocated for progressive history. If the present

278 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 278278 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM is the only appropriate standard by which to measure what is important in the past, then the historian is trapped in the “here and now,” since the “reality he attributes to the past” is only “the reality he recognizes in the present.”192 Rob- ert Berkhofer Jr. explains the dilemma in terms that underscore the complexities of the paradox that is presentism. “If the Other is a construction by the self of another, how can a self get outside the self to know the Other as another?”193 As strict relativists we can never completely escape the contingencies of our own worlds.194 Relativism forced scholars to wrestle with complicated questions such as popularizers rarely broached. “Is history just a subjective construction? Does it always bear the impress of contemporary thought?” “Is it always a matter of the present as extrapolated onto the past?” “If our choice of narrative refl ects only our power to impose our preferred version of reality on a past that cannot resist us, then what is left of history?”195 Other subsidiary questions emerged from these: “How can we judge the accuracy of the modern representation of the past against a postulated original when it is, by defi nition, past? How can we hope to re-present the past as it was when we must do so through present-day (re)creations?”196 Perhaps the biggest concern for anti-relativist scholars was what relativism implied for the abilities of historians to communicate with readers and each other effectively. Critics of Ellis’s Eclectic Primary History (1884) claimed that the school text “slandered the North and the cause of the Union,” “depreci- ated the value of our troops,” and “represented that the South was in the right, and that the army which saved the Union was a wicked aggressor.”197 Given his commitments to presentism and relativism, there was little Ellis could say in response to these condemnations other than to reject them as outside his own presentist perspective. If every man was his own historian spinning out personalized narratives in isolation, then there was little need for writers such as Ellis to rely on established intellectual communities to judge and evaluate the value of his stories. Revealingly, however, there was also little hope for those such as Ellis of fi nding any consensus among reviewers about the value of a text, since the perspectives of readers were irrevocably linked to their personal situations.198 Ironically, then, relativists were subject to the debilitating constraints of their own philosophy, since theoretically their works were inaccessi- ble to readers outside the “present” circumstances of authorship, publication and marketing that had produced them. This recognition of the evanescence of history may explain why so many popularizers updated their works with such frequency, Ellis’s People’s Standard History of the United States under- going yearly revisions in multiple editions published by at least three different companies between 1896 and 1900.199 It also suggests why professionals were so anxious to establish more permanent and stable standards of evaluation

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 279279 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM within the discipline of history, and why they scrutinized popular efforts such as Ellis’s decades after their works were fi rst issued.200 Despite its many iterations (or perhaps because of them) The People’s Stan- dard History sold reasonably well. Eventually 114,000 sets circulated (20,000 in the fi rst year), confi rming that Ellis’s history “was generally regarded as accurate, comprehensive and scholarly, free from sectional and political bias.”201 The salability of the volumes—“its sale continued long after his death”—seemed to verify what the publisher claimed for their author: that Ellis was a “a writer of prodigious industry,” who “has earned a fortune by his ability and writes because he loves the work.”202 Ellis tried later to increase the marketability of his efforts by combining chapters from The People’s Standard History of the United States with those of the Popular History of the World into a composite ten-volume work called The Story of the Greatest Nations and World’s Famous Events (1906). In the preface to volume one of this series, Ellis reaffi rmed his commitment to telling the “Story of the Past” in “so simple a form that every one, young and old, may understand and also enjoy it.” The value in such an exercise, he insisted, was in reminding students of history that the past “has moments of intense interest, situations more pathetic than those of our most brilliant novels, climaxes more dramatic than those of our strongest plays, scenes more dramatic than our strongest plays, scenes more poetic than any of our grandest poems.” Finding ways to protect “these priceless jewels” from those who would obscure them in their “weary plodding through all the dry and unnecessary dust of ages,” continued to be Ellis’s mission. 203 In establishing brilliant novels, dramatic plays, and grand poems as the standard of measure for historical productions, Ellis proved himself ever a popularizer at heart. Interestingly, however, the sales history of Ellis’s volumes also reveals the volatility of the popular book market, since, within a few months of the last printing of The People’s Standard History, Ellis was forced to declare personal bankruptcy. The popular historian’s shaky fi nancial status was due in part to legal costs he had incurred in divorcing his wife and in part because he had sold the copyrights to many of his best selling works to keep the rather ill-performing magazines he edited afl oat.204 Whatever the cause, Ellis was fi nancially insolvent and was forced to write for mail-order catalogues and a food store magazine until he found suffi cient time to return to the dime novel market. Though his “New Deerfoot” series helped him to recover some of his losses, Ellis seldom again returned to writing popular history after the publication of The People’s Standard History since it failed to compensate him adequately for the considerable time and energy it required. Professional historians had little sympathy for Ellis’s condition or for that of other popularizers who struggled to make ends meet by writing mass-produced histories. For them, the past was 280 } “A Background of Real History”

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 280280 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM not a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that scholars were equally contemptuous of Ellis’s efforts to turn The People’s Standard History of the United States into a motion picture. Ellis was serious about the idea and even contracted in 1915 with his idol, Thomas Edison, to produce several scripts for a pilot movie depicting key events in early American history. “The project fl oundered,” however, when Edison concluded that “documentary fi lm-making was unprofi table.”205 The release of The Birth of a Nation later that year suggested how wrong Edison had been in this decision, at least from a fi nancial point of view, although critics of the D. W. Griffi th fi lm did not consider it worthy of the label documentary; instead, they condemned it as another example of the distorting impulses of the popularization movement in history.206 In his futuristic speculations, Ellis often teased himself and his readers with the prediction that the twentieth century would witness a dramatic increase in the average life expectancy of humans to a hundred years and beyond. The unwarranted optimism of this assertion was confi rmed by Ellis’s own death in 1916 at the age of seventy-six.207 Despite his hopes for the perpetuity of his ideas, most of Ellis’s popular works of history also failed to demonstrate suffi - cient longevity. Part of their failure had to do, ironically, with changes in the intellectual climate for the receptivity of his ideas during and after World War I. “The experiences of this century hardly dispose us to any complacency about the present, still less about the future,” Gertrude Himmelfarb has written. “At every point we are confronted with shattered promises, blighted hopes, ir- reconcilable dilemmas, good intentions gone astray, a choice between evils, a world perched on the brink of disaster—all the familiar clichés, which are all too true and which seem to give the lie to the idea of progress.”208 Additionally, Ellis’s popular histories failed to sustain themselves because of a self-refuting quality specifi c to relativistic philosophies. Since “relativism must necessarily be, by its proponents’ own principles, itself a relative, rather than an absolute and timeless, truth,” Peter Novick has written, its historicity dooms it to eventual obsolescence. Even Ellis’s predictions for the future, some of which were realized in the twentieth century, did not save him from the obscurity borne of changing climates of opinion. In another sense, however, his relativism was self-affi rming, too. As Novick has suggested about Carl Becker, historians such as Ellis found that their “confi dence in the relativity of doctrines” was confi rmed, ironically and sadly, “by the next generation’s rejection of [their] doc- trine of relativism” and, consequently, of them.209

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 281281 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM There is no fi ction or non-fi ction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative. . . . Why should fi ction writers be denied the composition of history?—E. L. Doctorow (1985)

6...... Writing Himself

Out of Trouble

Julian Hawthorne

and the

Commercialism of

Popular History

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 282282 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM Living among the Elect

While the works of Eggleston and Ellis sold fairly well in the popular marketplace, their relativistic philosophies made it diffi cult for readers to fi nd any absolute standards in them by which to navigate safely in a chaotic, ever- changing contemporary world. Eggleston’s desire to tell the “past everything” and his rejection of singular explanatory devices had the disconcerting effect of pluralizing authority with respect to the past. His use of topical, non- narrative approaches instead of chronological, storytelling ones also threatened to trivi- alize history by destroying its coherence.1 Ellis’s habit of privileging the here and now, of concentrating on the immediate needs of the present, exacerbated such concerns by implying the conditional or contingent quality of all knowl- . edge. The volatile mixture of relativism and presentism caused others to fear that causation was vanishing as a heuristic tool in modern historical scholarship. The more arbitrary knowledge was, the greater also was the challenge of making meaningful pronouncements about the past.2 The prospect of reviving Ridpath’s old project of defi ning grand, synthesizing ideas that operated consistently across temporal realms seemed equally dim. Specialization within the discipline of history and new interests in distinctive perspectives also “discouraged the integration of particular histories into some kind of synthesis.”3 In short, the relativity of historical knowledge (with its “shallow indifference about ultimate truth”) made it diffi cult for people to establish permanent standards for action and left them devoid of the propensity for reasoned conviction or moral judgment.4 Skeptics also feared that the moral relativism of presentist methodologies encouraged an abnormal interest among historians in the tangible artifacts of contemporary culture, especially the economic and commercial ones, and left the door open for historical materialism. Eschewing metaphysical or speculative explanations for motivation and human behavior, historical materialists believed that the “structure of society and its historical development are determined by ‘the material conditions of life’ or ‘the mode of production of the material means of existence.’ ”5 This philosophy had implications not only for what historians studied about the past but how they studied it. The assumption here, Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted of the Marxist variant of materialism, is that ideas are not personal refl ections but “instruments of production and consumption,” while language is not a rhetorical device but an “instrument and product of power.”6 Not everyone within the profession was pleased with the commodifi cation of history implied by historical materialism, of course, and some rejected outright its tendencies to “tie literature, the arts and ideation in general to social class” while turning “ideas into ideologies and texts into Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 283

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 283283 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5012:58:50 PMPM discourses.”7 The notion that history is “devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations” was, in philosopher Alfred Whitehead’s estimation, an example of the unhealthy workings of “minds steeped in provinciality—the provinciality of an epoch, of a face, of a school of learning, of a trend of interest,—minds unable to divine their own unspoken limitations.”8 In repudiating the most pernicious particularizing elements of historical relativism, Whitehead called for a return to idealism and synthesis as a way of restabilizing the role of truth within the historical enterprise. He envisioned the past not as a myriad of disconnected contingencies but as “a space of stable relationships, known boundaries, and a sense of place.” For Whitehead, historical writing should provide an opportunity to engage with “those attributes construed to be absent from contemporary life.”9 In 1913, the Dodge Foundation for Citizenship attempted to combat the de- centralizing tendencies of relativistic, presentist, and materialistic thinking by sponsoring a series of lectures by Stanford professor Ephraim Douglass Adams to highlight the fact that the American people have been largely infl uenced in their development by moral principles or by abstract ideals. Published as The Power of Ideals in American History, these lectures were offered as an antidote to the “very decided tendency to seek purely material reasons for historical development” in a time “of undue emphasis on materialism.” With Beard’s Eco- nomic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) in mind, Adams complained that historians had turned the American Revolution into a wholly commercial enterprise, ignoring the ideals of political and religious freedom that had motivated its participants. Rejecting the tendency of some historians to reduce all history to base facts and material concerns, Adams called attention to those things “wholly impossible to reduction to concrete terms,” such as “an emotion, a sentiment, or an ideal,” which have served in the past as “all-powerful spring[s] of conduct, and the prime cause of political action,” even though they be “directly contrary to economic interests.” He spoke, for instance, of “the present tendency to minimize in our history the force of the anti-slavery ideal, or to deny its spiritual vigor” in the nineteenth century on the grounds that it had little practical infl uence on the institution of slavery. “The economic historian has said that, from 1840 to 1860, class interests ruled more than ever before in our history, and that ‘moral consciousness’ was at its lowest ebb,” noted Adams. Such assertions ran “directly contrary” to sensible thinking in his estimation, ignoring the fact that “back of the sordid, tangible explanation was an inspiring sentiment that touched men’s hearts and fi red imagination.” Historical materialists “mistook the shattering of traditions” associated with abolitionism and “the unrest of the time . . . for decay, when it was, in fact, the fi rst evidence of new life.”10 284 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 284284 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM For Adams, the period between 1840 and 1860 best demonstrated the power of idealistic rather than materialistic perspectives for narrating the past. Eco- nomic historians such as John R. Commons and Ulrich B. Philips, who edited a Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910–11), poked fun at the high-mindedness of the era, which they dubbed “the ‘hot air’ period of American history” because of its transcendental “talk-fest[s],” its loquacious lyceums and its idealistic but failed pursuit of the “brotherhood of man.”11 Adams challenged this negative assessment, however, by reminding readers that the decades prior to the Civil War were characterized by the admirable patriotism of Duyckinck and the Young Americans whose works represented “an outburst of intellectual and spiritual ideals of permanent force and value” and the fl owering of a “new sense of American nationality and idealism.”12 In a subsequent survey textbook on American History and in collaborative research he conducted on the pre–Civil War era with Charles Francis Adams Jr. (no relation), Ephraim reaffi rmed the belief that the years 1848 to 1860 constituted a vital period of unusual and important development for American ideals when “a blow struck at the emblem of an ideal [nationality] had suddenly revealed to a troubled people the place that ideal held in their hearts.”13 A glance through the important literature of the day suggested to him the degree to which the “higher ideals” of history almost always overshadowed the more base “assertions of economic principles” and “industrial benefi t.” Even in the inherently materialistic pursuit of mineral wealth in the 1849 rush, there was “a golden ideal in the emotion” amid “an alloy of baser metals,” he argued.14 No fi gure at midcentury personifi ed the role of the idealism in American development more for Ephraim Adams and Charles Francis Adams than Na- thaniel Hawthorne. Novels such as The Scarlet Letter as well as historical short stories such as “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” conveyed an “idealized” sense of the essence of seventeenth-century New England by drawing directly on documented colonial records and verifi - able historical episodes.15 Charles Francis Adams Jr. was a lifelong admirer of the works of Hawthorne, and he claimed to have learned more of colonial history from them than any other sources. While still a teenager, he devoted an entire summer to reading all of Hawthorne’s novels, and his fi rst published article was a critical assessment of those works for Harvard Magazine (1855). Adams wrote that Hawthorne “has pointed out where the strength of our nation lies, and he has done so unerringly” through “the peculiar nationality of his tone, of the scenery of his books, [and] of the style of his allusion.”16 His favorite Hawthorne novel was The House of the Seven Gables, which dealt with themes of inherited guilt and historical determinism.17 It was an epigrammatic novel that expressed “Hawthorne’s views about the sins of capitalist wealth

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 285285 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM handed down from one generation to another,” a theme Adams felt had personal implications for his own family’s “descent from glory.”18 For Adams, The House of the Seven Gables evoked not only universal truths of the sort that spoke to nearly all readers of Hawthorne, it also appealed directly to him as a personalized parable of crisis, renunciation, and reform.19 Even the professional scholars Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart admitted in their Guide to the Study of American History (1896) that novels such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables were relevant for historical study—“inaccurate in themselves, especially as to details,” perhaps, but still leaving “a permanent and reasonably correct impression on the minds of the reader.” The two Harvard professors were cautious about over- use of such works in historical instruction, however, since they viewed fi ction and history as ultimately incompatible enterprises. “Perhaps it is true that the novel-writer or poet produces the best and truest work when he is unhampered by the details of the real story and may aim to create only a general impression which shall be true to the general trend of history,” they argued. Such appeared to be the case in their estimation with Jane Goodwin Austin’s popular novel Standish of Standish (1890). “Mrs. Austin carries the Mayfl ower’s shallop into a cove in Clark’s Island, where the narrative of Bradford forbids the idea that the shallop was,” Channing and Hart noted. “[T]he plan of the story, the author has said, made it necessary for the boat to be at that particular place at the precise moment, and the spirit of the explorers is not affected by the de- viation.” Like Gay, the two Harvard historians resisted the temptation to my- thologize the Pilgrim landing. They acknowledged as well that Longfellow’s Miles Standish was also “painfully inaccurate and anachronistic as history; but he adds a man to our affectionate acquaintance.” The question for these scholars was, however, “[j]ust how far it is safe to accept a picture of which the details are not true to the time.” Whether the “ ‘general reader’ of Mrs. Austin’s tale or Longfellow’s poem gains a truer and more lasting impression of the spirit of Pilgrim colonization than he or she would obtain from Doyle, or Bancroft, or still better from Bradford’s epic itself,” was a question the authors of the Guide felt compelled to raise in light of the distinctions between works of fi ction and nonfi ction.20 A most interested party in this discussion was Jonathan Nield, an assiduous reader of novels and histories who published in 1902 a defi nitive list of those works of historical fi ction he felt were useful to teachers for the study of history in schools. In his bibliographic study Nield acknowledged that “the Romanti- cist” often “gives us a mass of inaccuracies” which “mislead the ignorant (i.e. the majority?)” and “are an unpardonable offence to the historically-minded reader.” In addition, he admitted that capturing the “spirit of a period” is 286 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 286286 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM nearly impossible, since, try as we may, we cannot “breathe the atmosphere of a bygone time” and should not be “hoodwinked” by the infl uence “of a pseudo- historic security” that suggests otherwise. That said, Nield reminded readers that “History itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of facts.” The “ideal of the Historian is Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination,” he argued, “but, as with all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised, and there is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration.” If readers have a “fairly accurate knowledge as regards the general history of any period,” and if if they be willing to make “some investigation into its special manners and customs,” then Nield saw “no reason why a truly imaginative novelist,” such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, “should not produce a work at once satisfying to romantic and historical instincts” alike. The “power of imaginative memory,” which we all exercise in our daily lives and which historical novelists like Hawthorne employ to elucidate the cultural élan of an age, he noted, “is not dependent on accuracy of representation” or “the power of reproducing in toto a past age,” but on the “attainment of a truer historic sense” through “great scholarship and narrative capacity.”21 From the perspective of Channing, Hart, and other scholars, however, the problem with drawing extensive lessons from the historical fi ction of transcendental writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne was that their works were too metaphysical in disposition, too spiritual in literary sensibility to be relied on for accuracy of historical detail. In a new “realist” age that valued concrete facts and verisimilitude in literary productions of any kind, it was increasingly diffi cult to market (especially as “histories”) those works of fi ction that relied on imaginative or speculative devices to achieve their historical effect. In a scholarly book on the topic, Professor J. Brander Matthews dismissed virtually all such literature as ahistorical.22 To the extent that descriptive powers such as those evidenced by Hawthorne were valued at all, they were only so when they captured the particulars of external appearance and circumstance rather than the “essence” of internal being, Matthews argued. The distinction was between the linguistic elements arising from idealized forms and the “phenomenological” conditions emanating from “an existential standpoint” and emphasizing the “everyday perceptions and experiences of historical reality.”23 Attacks by scholars on the “linguistic” propensities of idealists such as Hawthorne signaled something important about changing defi nitions of what constituted truth with respect to the past. Whereas training as a writer of fi c- tion once had been considered adequate (even desirable) preparation for work as an historian, Paul Leicester Ford noted, by the turn of the century it was viewed as an obstacle to overcome. The literary storytelling strategies used Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 287

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 287287 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM by novelists to reconstruct experience, that is, were less and less accepted by practicing historians.24 The resulting fl uctuations in Hawthorne’s reputation were attributable to the widening gap between “the constricted world of actual events” (history) and the “boundless imaginative realm of the storyteller’s art” (poetry and literature).25 For predictable reasons, no one in the fi eld of popular history was affected more profoundly by these debates over the relationship of the ideal to the real in historical studies than Julian Hawthorne, son of the gifted and controversial novelist. Born in 1846, Julian was dubbed “the Black Prince” by his father, ostensibly because of his dark complexion and impish personality. He grew up under the watchful eye of an observant Nathaniel, who thought deeply and constantly about the metaphysical consequences of having brought a “small troglodyte” into the world.26 On the one hand, Hawthorne admitted, he found it diffi cult to grasp the full corporeal meaning of his son’s existence, remarking to Julian’s aunt that the boy’s “present life has hardly substance and tangibility enough to be the image of eternity.” Refl ecting philosophically on the spiritual implications of parenting for the passage of time, he added, “[t]he future too soon becomes the present, which before we can grasp it, looks back upon us as the past. It must, I think, be only the image of an image.”27 On the other hand, Julian’s frequent interruptions of his father’s work on The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables were explicit enough reminders to the novelist that his son was a palpable, physical presence. The boy learned writing literally at the knee of his father, the master. “[Julian] climbs into a chair at my knee, and . . . looks curiously on the page as I write,” refl ected Nathaniel. “[N]ow, he nearly tumbles down, and is at fi rst frightened—but, seeing that I was like- wise startled, pretends to tumble again, and then laughs in my face.”28 By all accounts these interruptions were welcome enough by the easily distracted author who took pride in the promise of his son. “He has dark hair and is no great beauty at present,” Hawthorne noted of his constant companion, “but is said to be a particularly fi ne little urchin by everybody who has seen him.”29 Among those who “had seen him” in his infancy and youth were many of the most prominent New England intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century. At a very young age, Julian was introduced to the great pantheon of American writers who paraded through his parents’ homes in Concord, Salem, and Lenox, Massachusetts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Evert Duyckinck, William Story, William Cullen Bryant, the Brownings, and the historian John Lothrop Motley. “No other person still alive shared my good fortune or could duplicate my story,” Julian Hawthorne wrote later in life. “My father was one of the elect, and caused me to become a sort of household intimate of those friends of his.” Moving inconspicuously among members of an intellectual 288 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 288288 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM “elect” as an “unconsidered urchin” rather that “a Peer of the Realm,” Julian remembered that he had been privy not to “Emerson’s ‘Sphinx’ ” but to “the squeaking of his boots during one of his lectures”; not to his “soul,” but to his “clay”; not to the fact that “Thoreau built a hut beside Walden,” but to the reality that he had “lost his temper when the Selectmen put him into Concord jail.”30 For Julian Hawthorne, “these gracious giants of mind and character” seemed “nothing out of the ordinary.” As he put it: “my tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they would walk hand in hand with Emer- son along the village street, seek in the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown clay of the ‘Greek Slave,’ or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman . . . tell stories to the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees.” It was not until he reached late adolescence that the bubble of illusion in this matter of identity and privilege was burst for Julian. “Were human felicity so omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!” he concluded years later.”31 Julian’s favorite among his father’s friends was Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne noting with humor tinctured perhaps by a pang of jealousy that his son liked the author of Moby-Dick at least “as well as me.” Julian had especially fond memories of a trip to the Berkshires with his father, Melville, and the Duyckincks in which the young boy received the special attentions of the editor of the Library of American Books.32 Interestingly, Julian’s least cherished memories were of another future popular historian, the poet Wil- liam Cullen Bryant, whom he found “grey and inclement” like the weather in New England. The reputation for aloofness that Bryant tried to overcome with the publication of his Popular History of the United States in the 1870s was already well established by midcentury when Julian Hawthorne fi rst met the august fi gure. Once “the Bryants came to town,” Julian recalled, “and the old poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not a childly man, and we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe his white, Merlin beard and tranquil but chilly eyes.” “[T]here was nothing in him or about him to which a boy could attach himself,” Julian added, and “walking hand-in-hand with him was unthinkable. His eyes saw children no doubt, but never seemed to care to see into them; they were animated objects in no way related to him; metaphorically speaking, he stepped over them and passed on his way, erect and grave, if not stern.” Using language that refl ected the distinctions between the ideal and the real which preoccupied him throughout his adult life, Julian noted that Bryant preferred people in the “abstract, in their signifi cance to the universe,” rather than “in the concrete.”33 Julian grew up a bit spoiled by parents who were determined to protect him to the extent that they could from the hardships of life. He traveled extensively

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 289289 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM throughout the world with them, making lengthy trips during his boyhood to England, Switzerland, and Italy.34 He was described as “a tall handsome boy” who was “privileged, athletic, spoiled, & happy, though always in the shadow of brilliant, neurotic Nathaniel.” His mother, Sophia Amelia Peabody, was also a signifi cant infl uence in his development, particularly his metaphysical training. “She studied esotericism & collected volumes on occult research,” a biographer has noted, and “her love of supernatural speculation was expressed ‘not in its grosser phases, but as a deeper insight in the realm of causes.’ Hence she cultivated in her son his lasting belief that the most profound truths were to be discovered by means of occult knowledge, whereas ‘Science answers its own questions, but neither can nor will answer any others.’ ”35 Julian also credited his mother with the advancement of his considerable artistic sensibilities. “My aesthetic culture began with my mother in the nursery,” he wrote. Sophia had trained as a painter with Washington Allston and “had a great gift in the fi ne arts” which she passed on to her son by urging him to sketch “everything” he saw, “from a wild fl ower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains.” It was Julian’s mother who brought him home “a wonderful little volume—the Book of Ruth transcribed from the Bible in old English black-letter, with bor- ders faithfully reproduced from missals painted in the fourteenth century by Giulio Clevio in his monastic cell; with little miniatures, too, of fi gures and scenes in the story, thanks to Owen Meredith and Noel Humphreys.” Julian was taken with the book immediately and sought to duplicate it in various juvenile literary and pictorial productions of his own. These efforts awakened in him “a vehement desire to become an illuminator,” a passion he “zealously pursued for some ten years” as a school boy. “I remember that when one of my achievements was sold for one hundred dollars,” he wrote, “I invested the whole sum in material for further work in the line.”36 With regard to the historical imagination, Julian was infl uenced dramatically by his father’s unusual theories of education. Choosing not to send his son to school, Nathaniel Hawthorne instead read aloud to his young charge from the “great works” of literature, including Cervantes, Spenser, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, and, of course, Scott. “I beheld the knights in their shining armor, their crested helmets, their lances and excaliburs, and pined to be one of them,” Julian wrote later of his reaction to a lesson plan involving Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” Per- ceiving “the moral advantage of knighthood, and the stimulus afforded to the inward by the outward boy,” his mother encouraged Julian in these fantasies by outfi tting him “with a helmet, on the crest of which blazed the Dragon of the great Pendragon-ship with wings outspread, and a glorious tail streaming behind . . . made of cardboard covered with silver paper.” Julian acknowledged later that in the “sunshine in our back garden my aspect, prancing to and fro, 290 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 290290 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM was glorious,” especially when his father “contributed a real sword of tempered steel with a gilded hilt and a scabbard of black leather.” The boy grew up believing in “fairies, in magic, in angels, in transformation,” and in “Giant De- spair and the wicked enchanters,” all “inexhaustibly delightful” components of his parents’ “world of imagination.”37 His older sister, Una, “helped shape his love of the fantastic as the two of them lived daily in a world where fairies & magical transformations were wholehearted realities.”38 Occasionally they were given historical books to read, especially historical ﬁ ction. “Hans Christian An- dersen, Grimm, The Black Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books,” Julian wrote of his historical curriculum, “and Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography.”39 Julian’s “historical learning” was impacted further by instruction in the “Bem Method” of history, popularizied by Ridpath and others. Julian recalled squirming through his Aunt Lizzie’s demonstrations of the color- coded strategy, endeavoring to learn “ancient history, dates and all, by colored diagrams. . . . Here was old Plato’s Day in yellow and purple; this scarlet square is the birthday of Julius Caesar, 102 B.C.” By his own later admission, Julian was “always most inapt and grievous” in relation to this synchronic system, challenging his aunt’s “inexhaustible patience many a sad hour.” He remained a lifelong opponent of the colorized scheme, which he felt obscured rather than elucidated the important historical insights his father had taught him. “To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta,” Julian noted with embarrassment late in life, “though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John stood clearly pictured in my imagination.” His mind was a bit more retentive with respect to American history; not because of the Bem Method, however, but despite it. Seeking escape from painstaking memorization, Julian took long walks throughout New England with his father, who shared with him tales of great men and mighty deeds, of heroic valor and endurance, of the victories of Yankee patriots over British oppressors, and of the glories of George Washington and Paul Jones. These stories with local ﬂ avor “were always uttered under the open sky,” Julian noted, “as we walked side by side through the woods and meadows of Concord, or on the shores of Walden Pond, where the remains of Thoreau’s hut still stood.” Julian and his father both favored such a peripatetic style of learning over the rote memorization of timetables offered by Aunt Lizzie. Julian complained: “Dates were arbitrary, and to my memory nothing arbitrary would stick.”40 Yet some of the history to which Julian Hawthorne was exposed did stick with him. “We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to Caesar, and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 291291 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5112:58:51 PMPM Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than they are now,” he wrote in later life. “Consequently, everything in Rome had a certain degree of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the Capitol with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the tribunes and the patricians; heard the populus Romanus roar in the Coliseum; beheld the splendid processions of victory wind cityward through the Arch of Titus; saw Caesar lie bleeding at the base of Pompey’s statue; pondered over the fatal precipice of the Tarpeian Rock; luxuriated in the hollow spaces of the Baths of Caracalla; lost ourselves in gorgeous reveries in the palace of the Caesars, and haunted the yellow stream of Tiber, beneath which lay hidden precious treasures and forgotten secrets.” Julian and Una were “no less captivated by the galleries and churches, which contained the preserved relics of the great old times, and were in themselves so beautiful.” Sharing with his father an interest in the kinds of lessons obtained off the beaten trail, Julian came to appreciate the “obscure village antiquities, which had no special history attaching to them” but “were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of England, which had formed the scene and background of famous events.” He eschewed “conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional showman,” and the “hackneyed” things “told of in history books,” which partook too much of “the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers.” Instead Julian craved “the unknown past” and “the unrecorded things” that entered into his “most private sympathies and realization.”41 As much as Julian’s parents encouraged their son in his imaginative bent, they feared that overindulgence in it might leave him unprepared for the rigors of life. Nathaniel wrote: “Julian has too much tenderness, love, and sensibility in his nature; he needs to be hardened and tempered. I would not take a particle of the love out of him; but methinks it is highly desirable that some sterner quality should be interfused throughout the softness of his heart; else, in course of time, the hard intercourse of the world, and the many knocks and bruises he will receive, will cause a morbid crust of callousness to grow over his heart; so that, for at least a portion of his life, he will have less sympathy and love for his fellow-beings than those who began life with a much smaller portion.” Preoccupation with the ideal might make the real dangerous. “After a lapse of years, indeed, if he have native vigor enough, there may be a second growth of love and benevolence,” the father concluded, “but the ﬁ rst crop, with its wild luxuriance, stands a good chance of being blighted.”42 Sophia agreed, noting that Julian “is very strong and very gentle, and—you will forgive a mother for saying this—he is entirely of the aesthetic order, and his absence

292 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 292292 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM and unobservance of worldly considerations will probably not advance him in the dusty arena of life; but he will be unspoiled in the next world, I think, and I hope he will be able to make at least a living in this.”43 Cerebral and spiritual in outlook, Julian struggled his entire life more or less unsuccessfully to fulfi ll this latter wish on behalf of his mother. In order to prepare him better for living in the “real world,” the Hawthornes sent Julian at the age of fourteen to the private Concord school of Frank B. Sanborn, a member of his father’s Transcendentalist circle.44 At fi rst, Julian did not take well to the idea of a formalized education with its more disciplined intellectual methods. “On the appointed morning, I set off alone, my father watching me off with a heartless smile, making gestures as of chastisement. ‘If I’m killed, perhaps he’ll be sorry!’ was my refl ection as I strode onward.”45 Eventually Julian learned some Latin at Sanborn’s school and prepared himself adequately enough to qualify for admission to Harvard in 1863.46 But he did not thrive there. “His attendance was irregular, his grades were poor, and after two years he seems to have disappeared from the college,” wrote one biographer.47 In addition, Julian was distracted by the Civil War, which he desired earnestly to enter for idealistic reasons. “[M]y voice was all for war,” Julian noted, lobbying hard for permission to enlist with a parent whose romanticiza- tion of battle now came back to haunt him. “[My father] had always stimulated my patriotism with his tales of our Revolution, so that I thirsted for the blood of Englishmen, though I much liked those I happened to know,” Julian wrote. “In our Civil War, I transferred my British animosities to the Southerners; but they fortunately escaped my wrath by the Peace of Appomattox.” More to the point, perhaps, Julian was prevented from entering the war by the sudden death of his father in 1864 at the age of sixty. “I had become the head of the family,” he wrote with a sense of somber responsibility that bespoke the press of reality, “and mustn’t leave them unprotected.”50 He dropped out of Harvard to look after his mother and sister. Julian was back at Harvard two years later to pursue a degree in civil engineering at the Lawrence Scientifi c School, but he did not fi nish that program either. This pattern of beginning ventures that he could not complete defi ned Julian’s career and was a trait he shared with Ellis, Eggleston, and others who became popular historians after having bounced around for years in a variety of work capacities. Following several postwar trips to Europe (where he met his future wife, May “Minnie” Albertina Amelung), and a brief stint as a civil engineer in the New York City Department of Docks, which he hated, Julian quit the engineering fi eld altogether. Instead he pursued a career as a writer.49 This was a decision arrived at only after a great deal of trepidation, since Julian had no training in any literary fi eld and had published nothing of signifi cance. In

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 293293 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM addition, neither of his parents “wanted their son to be a penman, as Nathaniel, who to support his family had had to work as a customs ofﬁ cer, knew it to be well nigh impossible to make a vocation of writing.”50 Some biographers have viewed Julian’s decision to become a writer as a form of rebellion against the advice of his recently deceased father, while others have seen it as the fulﬁ llment of a family legacy from which there was little escape.51 In either case, after having had a short story published in Harper’s Weekly, Julian began “to imagine he might achieve a degree of independence through writing.” According to one biographer, the expectation that he could earn a living with the pen “was a delusion” that Julian “was frequently to regret in years to come.”52

“Something to Be Sentimental Over”

Julian Hawthorne began his writing career composing novels and short stories at a furious pace. He was so prolifi c, in fact, that he out-wrote his highly productive father, authoring twenty-six novels, over sixty short stories, almost a hundred essays, and several lengthy works of biography and autobiography.53 Some of his works had a fairly wide circulation. Bressant (1873), for instance, was translated into Turkish and, according to Max Miller of Aldine, “was being read in the cafes & kif dens of Constantinople” throughout the decade.54 The novel’s popularity may be attributed in part to its scandalous themes reminiscent of Lippard, especially infi delity and polygamy, since it dealt with a man who falls in love with two women at the same time, demonstrating “brute-like ferocity” with one and the “purity and tenderness of a lofty nature” with another. In this as well as in many of his other novels, Julian also emulated the psychological realism practiced by the naturalists of his day. The results were not always satisfactory for author or audience. “ ‘Psychical analysis’ is, we believe, the name that is given to the exceedingly distasteful quality which marks Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s novel, Bressant, and which is to be found in many French novels of various grades, as well as in the yellow-covered literature of other times and countries,” one critic complained. This anonymous reviewer for The Nation argued in the manner of E. L. Godkin that the novel “lacks de- cency,” substituting “a morbid fi ngering of unclean emotions” for a “genuine study of human beings.” Society has agreed that “there are certain subjects which shall not be talked about by its members, and which are eschewed even by intimate friends,” he argued, and hence, for such reasons, “one cannot help regarding with even greater dislike a book which is to have wide circulation among inexperienced readers, who get a very great part of their knowledge of the world—to call it knowledge—from what they read, and which will give 294 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 294294 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM such persons so inaccurate and misleading an idea of what they themselves and other people are.”55 Such reviews explain why, as Maurice Bassan has noted, “Hawthorne’s openly professed commercialism and his exploitation of sensual themes, alienated him from the affections of the genteel critics.”56 Despite his prodigious output (which might have entitled him to an independent standing as a man of letters), therefore, Julian never approached the level of his father as a novelist. As the Dictionary of American Biography notes: “Hawthorne’s attitude toward his own writing was frankly commercial. He wrote rapidly, revised little, lost interest in his novels before he completed them, and had few illusions regarding their worth.”57 Julian was always un- dervalued by critics who looked for the father in the son and found the latter wanting. He acknowledged that his father’s infl uence was profound in his life and in his work. “[T]he memory of my father has always been with me, and has doubtless infl uenced me more than I am myself aware,” he wrote.58 But Julian was not always happy with the infl uence of this family legacy, and, like a typical Hawthorne, he agonized over the constraints of a generational inheritance. “My father is the worst enemy I have,” the son wrote in a moment of despair. “It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different calling, but whatever I write must always be compared to what he wrote.”59 As his biographer Lionel Stevenson noted, Julian “was either condemned out of hand, on the assumption that he was trying to capitalize on his relationship, or else he was measured solely by the criterion of his father’s work. Good qualities were praised as survivals of the paternal genius, and anything which the critics disliked was branded as a pathetic lapse from the Hawthorne tradition.”60 Among the transmitted features most often identifi ed in the fi ction of Julian Hawthorne was the author’s interest in the distinction between the “world of matter” and the “world of spirit.” Both Hawthornes believed in the primacy of the mind over the body in any such Cartesian duality, but while the father focused on the gothic and supernatural elements of the spirit, the son preferred the spiritual essence that emanated from the practical and real.61 In “The De- sire for Truth,” Julian Hawthorne argued that the “poetic truths” sought by his father’s generation were “based upon tradition and fancy,” a disposition toward the ideal that put them sadly out of touch with the realities of modern life. The majority of readers in the late nineteenth century wanted “to know things as they really are,” he concluded. No longer satisfi ed with “fables and legends, and with the irresponsible vagaries of dreamers” that had sustained early historians of Irving’s ilk, he wrote, “we have comprehended that the truth about ourselves, and about the universe which we inhabit, is far more wonderful and absorbing than any fairy tale; and, moreover, that sound knowledge of such truth is productive of practical good and power in the conduct of our Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 295

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 295295 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM lives.” This was not to say that “poetry and romance are dead, or even can die,” Julian wrote; he was too much a Hawthorne for that. But he espoused “a new poetry and a new romance founded upon scientifi c truth” rather than upon “lifeless sentiment” and whimsical fancy.62 Julian’s theory of a grounded imagination was carefully laid out in a collection of literary essays, Confessions and Criticisms (1887), in which he noted that writers in his father’s day had gone too far in trusting the “inward touchstone of truth,” while those of his own generation believed too fervently in “external experience” as the only true source of authenticity. Julian sought to reconcile the two positions by distilling from specifi c historical circumstances those essences that were the prevailing philosophical and spiritual principles inherent in the human condition.63 Though many of Julian Hawthorne’s best novels, such as Garth (1877) and Fortune’s Fool (1883), explored aspects of the new scientifi c realism of the age, he never embraced fully “the photographic method of novel-writing” prevalent in the late nineteenth century.64 Discouraged by the too-easy self-assurance of naturalists and realists like Zola, who claimed to record human nature with the neutral fi delity of a camera, Julian warned that photographic writing was as susceptible to misstatement as photograph taking. “We think we understand photography, even the x-ray ones,” he wrote, “but what light, and whence, prints the record on this fi lm? Memory is free from the fetters of time and space, as man is not, and proves how unreal they are.”65 In a newspaper review article titled “The Picture Show,” for example, Hawthorne condemned one artist’s full-length portrait of a subject because the “true character” of the sitter had been lost in the photographic realism of the presentation. “The likeness is accurate, as if based on a photograph, which I almost suspect to be the case,” he wrote, “but the thing has no more depth or atmosphere than a wallpaper pattern.”66 Photographic means of reproduction also left Julian Hawthorne cold, as he revealed in the short story “A Picturesque Transformation” about a poor painter, who, having produced a great work of art, expended his creative energies in mass-producing the painting to the detriment of both copies and the original. The repetition of function inherent in the process of photographic duplication as well as the materialism implicit in such reiterations compromised badly the artist’s originality, in Julian’s framing of the issues.67 In such stories about the dangers of mass-produced images, Hawthorne echoed the sentiments of many late nineteenth-century artists like himself trained in the “crafts” tradition, who regretted the loss of originality and charm occasioned by advanced technologies. Chromolithography was a case in point. As Lawrence Levine has noted, this process, “by which original paintings were reproduced lithographically in color and sold in the millions to all segments of the population,” was assailed by critics such as Godkin, who claimed that it 296 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 296296 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM “symbolized the packaged ‘pseudo-culture’ that ‘diffused through the community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge’ and gave people the false confi dence of being ‘cultured.’ ” Consequently, Levine argues, the term “chromo” became synonymous with “ugly” or “offensive” by 1890.68 Julian Hawthorne had this kind of anti-mechanical cultural criticism in mind when he jotted the following note in his private journal in that same year: “The problem with mechanical forms of reproduction was that they were unthinking; their precision was an accuracy of the body but not of the mind, and not of the obscured, hidden beauties of life,” he wrote. The same held true for mechanical forms of fi c- tion writing. Recognizing that the “Fanaticism of Realism” was “a reaction from the lifeless sentiment and morbid humbug which had come down to us from an ill-educated and artifi cial Past,” Hawthorne argued that “unless our modern novelists relent a little from the severity of their Realistic prepossessions, there seems to be some danger that they smother themselves in the albumen and yolk [of Shakespeare’s cosmic egg].” He believed that good literature “depended for its worth and veracity, not upon adherence to scientifi c exactitude or verifi cation of literal fact, but upon ‘its perception and portrayal of the underlying truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect shadow.’ ”69 Some critics of Hawthorne’s novels found the author’s efforts to wrestle with the mind/body problem intriguing, but most identifi ed faults with the manner in which he abstracted the ideal from the real. Often Hawthorne resorted in his fi ction to lengthy philosophical monologues uttered by obscure characters whose sole literary purpose was to serve as the author’s mouthpiece. Over time, Hawthorne’s novels and short stories became increasingly convoluted in pursuit of this theoretical system, and their complexities alienated readers who preferred such refl ections to emanate more naturally from the details of plot and character. As one critic noted, his “philosophical speculations on the nature of man, on human destiny and free will, and on the virtues and vices of civilization not only damned the narrative fl ow but appeared out of place in stories whose settings and characters were bizarre or romantic.”70 At times Hawthorne even seemed to violate his own principles of scientifi c realism, as when he introduced in The Spectre of the Camera (1888) an improbable photographic device that recorded only the phantasmagorical shadows of fi gures rather than the sitter’s themselves.71 Hawthorne’s intention in employing such a camera was to suggest the spiritual forms that lay behind the tangible world, but readers viewed the strategy as a misplaced effort to add fanciful elements to an already unrealistic tale. And the consensus among critics was that Haw- thorne elaborated continuously on the same misguided program of unrealistic realism in nearly all his works, varying only the settings and temporal sequencing. As one reviewer put it: “his talents are inadequate, his work frequently Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 297

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 297297 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM chaotic, often recklessly sensational, and he is perpetually playing variations of the same tune on the same old Stradivarius.”72 From the point of view of Hawthorne’s role in the development of the genre of popular history, these tendencies toward philosophical speculation were revealing because they refl ected directly on his perceptions of what constituted historical truth. Here again Hawthorne’s reputation was not as strong as his father’s and provided little protection from attacks. Many critics of his fi ction took issue with his shortcomings and vulnerabilities in these historical matters. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, ridiculed Hawthorne’s Dust (1883) for the “historical inaccuracy” of its diction and costume, while other reviewers complained of the “uncomfortable sense of allegorical intention” that permeated books ostensibly grounded in present realities.73 The eminent realist Henry James noted that in the novel Idolatry (1874), “Mr. Hawthorne spins his thread out of his fancy, and at the touch of reality it would very soon snap.”74 In the pages of his memoirs, Hawthorne admitted that he often sacrifi ced fi delity for feeling in his works of fi ction. “I am too certain,” he declared, “too fl ippant, too indifferent to everything, the truth included. I have no reverence for anything, and would sacrifi ce anything, truth included, for the sake of a startling or picturesque effect.”75 It was one thing to be fanciful and irreverent in fi ction, but quite another to be so in history, and even Julian acknowledged that his inclinations to seek the ideal beneath the real did not always sit well with professional historians. He made little effort “to achieve the authorial invisibility” or the “rigid self-elimination” that professional scholars demanded, choosing instead to insert his own opinions whenever and wherever he chose.76 “[D]on’t be surprised at whatever these pages may tell or omit,” Hawthorne warned scholars regarding his whimsical approach to the past. Admitting that his mind was drawn “inadvertently” at times to “some isolated person or occurrence of the past” which grabbed him with “a hundred octopus-feelers,” he begged readers to tolerate the capriciousness of his historical vision. “Like the man at the dance-hall piano, I am doing my best,” he explained.77 A particularly revealing example of Hawthorne’s dubious conceptions of historical truth came in a confession of sorts he made in his memoirs concerning a monument erected to the Hawthornes in England. Julian had received a letter from a committee of citizens in Rock Park, England, who wished to memorialize the place where the Hawthornes had lived in the 1850s. Their work had halted, however, because they were unsure which among several houses was the appropriate one. The correspondent “enclosed photographs of them all, and requested me to put a cross over our former habitation,” explained Julian. “Now, all the houses in Rock Park had been turned out of the same mould, and I knew no more than my interrogator which was which. But 298 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 298298 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM I refl ected that the committee had been put to trouble and expense for photographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that was really wanted was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than disappoint them, I resorted to a kind of sortes Virgilianae; I shut my eyes, turned round thrice, and made a mark at hazard on the line of photographs.” Even though the chance of identifying the correct house was only one in four, Hawthorne submitted his randomly chosen image as the authentic location, and the committee erected a monument confi rming the spot. Justifying the ruse on the grounds that “the pilgrims have been made happy” and that no real “harm has been done,” nevertheless Hawthorne confessed: “the matter has weighed somewhat on my conscience ever since, and I am glad to have thus lightened myself of it. What would one better do in such circumstances?” he asked.78 This startling confession underscored what critics had been saying about the variability of evidence in the hands of those not attendant to its subtleties. More important, it called into question Hawthorne’s integrity as a seeker after truth, a trait of increasing relevance to his writing career as he moved from fi ction writing to journalism in the 1880s and 1890s.79 Part of Hawthorne’s motivation for the change was fi nancial. Unable to secure contracts for many of the pieces he wished to publish and ineffective in getting companies to pay on time for the works he did publish, Hawthorne found himself in the late 1880s slipping into a depression, reminiscent of John Frost’s, about his inability to provide for his growing family, now numbering nine children. “Since my family has attained its present respectable dimensions, I have heard something of the howling of the wolves in the forest; and more than once have been forced to stand hard to my defence,” he wrote a relative. “This may surprise you,” he added; “for the general impression (which I am by no means concerned to efface) seems to be that I am . . . rolling in gold. The truth is that like many other men of transcendent genius and worth, my reputation is much sounder than my bank account.”80 Hawthorne’s son, Fred, confi rmed these troubles when years later he remarked: “No matter where we lived, . . . I still have indelible memories of tradesmen wearing out the ‘Welcome’ mats at our various residences, looking for payment for groceries, butchers and bakers, etc.”81 At one point, Hawthorne was accused of selling the same magazine article to competing magazines, one in the United States and the other abroad, in order to pay bills.82 Reduced to trading the Hawthorne family silver to make ends meet, his despair over money pushed him closer to a fulfi llment of his parents’ dire predictions that a “morbid crust of callousness” would envelop him. “[L]ife has ceased being a picture and a song to me,” he declared; “truly it is a mighty responsibility.”83 The one marketable commodity Julian had was his family name, so he continued to put the Hawthorne imprimatur before the public wherever possible,

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 299299 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5212:58:52 PMPM especially in the form of newspaper bylines. He felt uniquely suited to the job of correspondent because of his capacities for generalizing and his powers of literary description.84 In seeking a position on the Sun, for instance, he told his would-be employer: “I can . . . describe earthquakes and murders, or even interview eminent persons,” a resumé of topics and talents that expanded after he received the job to include articles on baseball, bowel trouble, plagues, and assassinations.85 As a journalist, Hawthorne traveled around the world on various assignments, including coverage of famine in India and war in Cuba.86 He wrote articles objecting to the “stupid and objectless” qualities of college football in which “heaped-up rushes and collisions” suggested a game that might better “be played on the blackboard” with “every once in a while a player . . . crushed to death under a steam hammer.”87 Race attracted him as a “philosophical” topic, and he contributed several pieces to the Atlanta Constitution calling for a more humane treatment of African Americans in the South.88 One such article incurred the wrath of the editors of the Washington Post, who complained that the idealistic journalist knew “very little of the real conditions prevailing” in the South. Southerners “have not waited for Mr. Ju- lian Hawthorne to tell them about their duty to the negroes,” the writer noted smugly, nor had a leader such as Booker T. Washington troubled himself with idle theoretical vagaries that occupied the former novelist, since, according to the Post, he “has sense enough to know that, with the blacks as with the whites, property and money are at the bottom of infl uence and recognition.”89 Other readers objected to some of the political overtones of Hawthorne’s weekly columns. In covering the 1896 election, for instance, Hawthorne referred to Republican presidential candidate McKinley as “the little gilded, pinchbeck Major, peeking and piping his complacent platitudes in his Canton cottage, appearing on his little porch and retiring from it like the pith fi gure in a weather box,” whereas the Democratic challenger, William Jennings Bryan, was depicted nobly as “standing like an oak, strong, fresh, sincere, benefi cent, telling truth, and doing good to friend and foe alike.” Republicans rejected the blatant partisanship of these descriptions—reminiscent of Ridpath’s excesses in the Arena, for which Julian also wrote—noting that in such instances, “Mr. Hawthorne has sacrifi ced fairness to literary effect.”90 Still others questioned Hawthorne’s journalistic techniques with regard to an incident in which he was denied access to the hearings of the Commission to Investigate the Conduct of the Spanish-American War as a reporter for the New York Journal.91 Staging a sit-in outside the investigating commission’s council chamber to protest his exclusion, Hawthorne was ridiculed openly in the Washington Post for his stub- bornness. “Nobody listens to Hawthorne,” a mean-spirited editorialist noted. “Nobody has recognized the necessity of his advice and countenance. Nobody 300 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 300300 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM has subscribed to the opinion that human effort must be futile without a boost from him. He wanders here and there, a Niobe in trousers—trousers that bag in deference to his woe—and soon a monolith will signify his once proud form and be the sole reminder of his emotions.” Adding potential injury to insult, the editors of the Post warned that Julian Hawthorne’s friends “should look to him” with an awareness that if “he throws a few more fi ts,” Washington “will refuse to answer for the consequences.” Within a week, the paper predicted, readers will be able to peek “through a grating in some place of kindly refuge, and to see a wild-eyed person with straw sticking freely in his hair, and to fi nd that the wickedness of the Investigating Commission has been set aside for the triumphant anthem of the King of Siam.”92 Although he earned a reputation as a thorough researcher and gifted pre- senter of topics, Hawthorne did not last long at the Sun or at any of the other papers on which he worked, generally because of his disdain for the commercial elements of journalism. Disheartened by the “new gospel of the auctioneer’s catalogue, and the crackling of the thorns under a pot,” Hawthorne grappled constantly with the negative implications of profi t motives for the integrity of his journalistic efforts. Most writers “starve or take up some other form of work,” he wrote later in life, adding cynically: “I never counsel anyone to undertake the profession of literature. In this age of competition and struggle, it might be, during at least three hundred days out of every three hundred and sixty-fi ve, a trade, and not an art. And it is one of the hardest trades, when it is a trade at all. The fi nest faculties of the mind must be harnessed to the lowest uses. Your poem represents a pot of soup: your story, a month’s rent; your essay, a week’s wash. . . . And the more authors there are, the greater must be the number of those foredoomed to failure.” The money from writing was not suffi cient even if the commercial incentive was, he argued, since journalists on most newspaper and magazine staffs faced “crushing odds.”93 These objections served as rationalizations for Hawthorne’s inabilities to meet his deadlines, but they did not protect him from the unemployment that often resulted. His dismissal from The American, for instance, was “on account of the impossibility of accomodating [sic] my system to that of Mr. Hearst,” he explained to friends who became accustomed to such periodic fi rings.94 Like his contemporary Edward Ellis, Haw- thorne contemplated declaring personal bankruptcy in light of his inabilities to earn money, despite an almost frenetic output of written works commissioned by others. “I think that, for a man of talent—certainly for a man of genius—the worst possible school of literature is journalism,” he concluded, “because it destroys this early enthusiasm, and checks individuality.”95 Out of despair for the commercialism of journalism, Hawthorne turned to popular history as an outlet for his creative energies. While he maintained

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 301301 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM loose affi liations with newspaper offi ces throughout his entire literary career and continued to dabble in fi ction, by the 1890s he was more and more preoccupied with writing history. He began modestly in 1893 by taking on “historical hackwork as an additional source of income,” including a two-volume history of the state of Oregon, for which he received a thousand dollars.96 Later that year he produced Humors of the Fair, “a rambling, carelessly organized book that expanded several articles on the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 written for Lippincott’s and Cosmopolitan.”97 Many of these works proved dissatis- fying and nonremunerative, and even the Hawthorne name was no protection against the instability and unprincipled character of the popular book market. In one representative instance, Hawthorne received a letter from a Mr. W. D. Vincent asking him to autograph a book on the state of Washington that bore Julian’s name as editor. Hawthorne wrote back the following letter of concern: “I am sending you the ‘History’ by post, insured. It is only fair that I should tell you that I fi nd, upon examining it, that I did not write a line of it, or was aware that it existed. . . . I was not consulted in its making, or knew that it was projected . . . and the introduction on the title page of my name as Editor is, of course, without my consent, and very unwelcome to me.” Rankled that others were attempting to exploit the family name on which he depended more and more for his livelihood, Hawthorne elaborated: “I wrote a history of Oregon, at the request of a person who called upon me in New York, and was very urgent on the matter. He paid me, I think, one thousand dollars for the work, in four instalments [sic], which there was great diffi culty in collecting,” and “the style in which it is written would disgrace a schoolboy.”98 Hawthorne later collaborated with a Texan, Leonard Lemmon, on a survey textbook of American literary history, and this work also raised concerns about the novelist-turned-historian’s methodologies and his credibility. The New York Tribune proclaimed the volume a “Queer Text-Book” and a “Strange Produc- tion” because of its partisanship and literary excesses. Calling attention not only to Lemmon’s “extreme Southern bias” but to Hawthorne’s inheritance of his father’s “southern sympathies,” the Tribune refused to recommend the volume to northern audiences without strong reservations about its point of view.99 The assessment was a source of great anxiety for Lemmon, who wrote his coauthor asking whether Hawthorne could use his infl uence to convince academic scholars to defend the work against spurious attacks by “the penny-a- liners” on the Tribune staff. The “matter has really become somewhat serious,” Lemmon noted. “I expect to make my living—a good deal of it at any rate—by text-books and a conviction of prejudice will be injurious to me.”100 Hawthorne expressed less outward concern, but he, too, was affected by such characterizations and the insinuation that his “writing was frankly commercial.”101 He tried

302 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 302302 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM to assert his convictions concerning objectivity in book review projects taken on to earn a little extra money, including in his critique of Frederic Chapman’s history of royal palaces: “At fi rst, one might wish that the work had been in- trusted to some writer of imaginative and even political tendencies, who would have worked up gorgeous and moving portrayals of the scenes and persons of splendor, intrigue, and tragedy or comedy, that are involved in the narrative,” Hawthorne wrote. “But after fi nishing the volume one perceives that no such em[bellishing] of the plain facts is required; the facts speak loudly enough for themselves. There never was such another story as this of the English kings and queens; never such another company of gorgeous savages.”102 Despite criticisms of his perspectives as a historian, Hawthorne persisted with his historical work because he found it the most fertile ground for the working out of his personal philosophies concerning the relationship between the ideal and the real. The preface to the Oregon volumes is very revealing in this regard, suggesting as it does the degree to which Hawthorne’s historical thinking paralleled his approach to fi ction. “History is to-day at least as much a fi ne art as is the writing of imaginative fi ction,” he wrote; “it is no less rich in the interests arising from the manifestations of human nature; and it is fertile in the problems of social and political science.”103 For Hawthorne, the past was an intensely personalized and subjective fi eld of study, and he tried to demonstrate in his nonfi ction prose how history could be enlivened with autobiographical detail. “I was born at the time when General Zach Taylor was leading his little army against Mexico; was fourteen when Sumter surrendered, and a Harvard undergraduate when Lincoln died,” he wrote in demonstration of this personalized form. “Queen Victoria of England had fi fty years yet to reign; the great World War was not yet imagined; persons and events which are household words today were unseen and unheard then; the twentieth century was a remote Phantom of the Dawn. And when I look back over the sands of Time which my feet have trod, I seem incredible even to myself.” Acknowledging the undeniable infl uence of subjective experience on historical outlook, Hawthorne even fl irted with a presentism that would have delighted relativists such as Ellis. “Only today is, yesterday and tomorrow are insubstantial visions,” he noted, adding polemically: “Einstein says today will come back to us, after making the circuit of the light year. And perhaps it won’t matter much if it doesn’t.”104 In adopting such a relativistic stand, Hawthorne revealed some overlaps with the new social historians of his generation whose works he read and reviewed. In a lengthy and enthusiastic analysis of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civi- lization, Hawthorne argued that the work was noteworthy because it aspired to focus on the “common people” rather than on the “aristocrats” and “kingdoms” that distracted previous historians who failed to detect the “protoplasm” of the Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 303

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 303303 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM past where they could “learn to comprehend history in its germ.” Eggleston’s book seemed “to get beneath even the people themselves,” he wrote, in an attempt to “discover of what clay they are composed, and whence they got their ideas.” Hawthorne admitted that “Dr. Eggleston is something of a materialist” and that his excessive concern for material culture threatened at times to dehu- manize the past. Eggleston managed to offset the most damaging effects of this materialism, however, by incorporating into his work a dramatist’s appreciation of human detail. The Transit of Civilization duplicated “the kind of life that the historical novelist would value for his side scenes and local color,” wrote Haw- thorne admiringly, adding that such a history as Eggleston’s requires a “powerful constructive that from the dry bones and parchments which he dug up he could erect a living and breathing fi gure.” Empathy was the key component in the historian’s success. Eggleston had managed to “clothe himself in the garments and in the limited notions and speculations of the period he treated,” Hawthorne wrote. He had found a convincing way to “look out at the world through eyes which had been closed for centuries,” all the while bearing in mind “the present moment, in order to make his picture intelligible; to give it depth, perspective and chiaroscuro, and not a mere fl at and unatmosphered Chinese design.”105 Critics of Hawthorne’s (and Eggleston’s) ego-centered philosophy declared it “not objective,” of course. How can we trust anything other than our own impressions in such a relativistic scheme? How might we escape from the kind of subjectifying fantasies that had characterized the fi ction and history of Nathan- iel Hawthorne?106 Julian imagined, however, that he had carved out a middle ground between what Robert Berkhofer Jr. refers to as “the noble dream of scientifi c objectivity and the nightmare of complete relativism” by defi ning “the terrain of pragmatic truth, which provides us hypotheses, provisional syntheses, imaginative but warranted interpretations,” and which points the way to “continuing inquiry and experimentation.”107 Pragmatic truth constituted a kind of “principled opportunism” by which students of history could extrapolate from the real to the ideal in ways that were useful to the present. It was Hawthorne who had criticized Edward Eggleston for not including illustrations in The Transit of Civilization, for instance, an omission which he thought was “regrettable” in an age of mass production, but at the same time he praised the author for his descriptive word portraits of historical fi gures that penetrated through the “external surface of persons” to the “signs or expressions of inner truths.”108 In passing such judgments, Hawthorne declared his allegiance to a useful axiom intrinsic to popular history since its inception as a genre; namely, that the signifi cance of historical literature inhered in its relevance to the personal needs of its readers. From the crude vernacular of Frost to the more sophisticated idioms of Ridpath, all bona fi de popular histories evidenced this concern for 304 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 304304 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM the demands of the “people.” If the words and images of history were to serve the populace, Hawthorne recognized, they must address national problems in forms meaningful to those responsible for developing solutions—in forms, that is, that were accessible without being trivialized into “literary chromos.” It was this insight that motivated Julian Hawthorne to undertake the writing of a multivolume popular history of the United States in the late 1890s. Despite the proliferation of such widely circulating works by Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and others, Hawthorne felt he had a unique perspective to offer the American people based on his sense of the potential for the creative tensions implicit in the relationship between the ideal and the real. Many particular episodes “of adventure and exploration” in the American past are “rich in picturesque characters and romantic interest,” he informed would-be readers of his volumes, “but they have little organic relation to the history of the true America—which is tracing of the development and embodiment of an abstract idea.” Seeking a “coherency” between “the practical and the theoretic temperaments,” he noted that the “opposition” between real and ideal is both “organic” and “ir- reconcilable, but nevertheless wholesome,” since “both sides possess versions of the same truth, and the perfect state arises from the contribution made by both to the common good—not from their amalgamation, or from a compromise between them.”109 As a means for working out the implications of this thinking, Hawthorne contracted with Peter F. Collier, the publisher of Col- lier’s Weekly: An Illustrated Journal, for a three-volume popular history titled Hawthorne’s United States and a one-volume history of Spanish America.110 These books were conceived as part of a larger sixty-volume set of popular histories titled The Nations of the World, for which Julian served as general editor and supplemental author. Alongside Guizot’s Popular History of France and Green’s Short History of England, Hawthorne’s popular history was designed, in the words of its advertisers, as part of a “general scheme of the series” to bring the “world’s best histories” to the American people. The history of each nation “is brought down to date by clever and competent historians and journalists,” the display advertisements noted with little sense of the ambivalence or potential contradiction between the two vocations.111 Hawthorne hoped he qualiﬁ ed in both categories, although subsequent reviewers of his volumes were unconvinced that he had proven himself worthy in either.

The Apotheosis of History

It is ironic that an idealistic writer who turned to popular history as an escape from the commercialism of journalism was so affected by economic

Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 305

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 305305 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM concerns in the writing of his history. Julian Hawthorne kept diaries throughout his life, and those from the last few years of the 1890s are fi lled with succinct references to his fi nancial affairs, including the details of his arrangements with Collier for the “Nations of the World” series.112 The installments of these journals reveal a very patterned and deliberate way of working, Haw- thorne recording with regularity that he “Wrote History” and then “picked up $100 from Collier’s.” Week after week the entries proceed in this fashion, interrupted only occasionally by a comment like that of Saturday, January 7, 1899: “Wrote History. Toothache.” On Thursday, July 20, 1899, however, the tone of these entries changed dramatically with this single line: “Letter from Collier saying my account was overdrawn and he could let me have no more money for some time.” Like Sydney Howard Gay, Hawthorne had used up his credit with a fi scally cautious publisher, and he was now once again in fi nancial trouble.113 Begging for advances from journal editors to whom he made regular submissions and working hard to retrieve unpaid fees from others, Hawthorne cobbled together enough money to make it through the year, but, also like Ellis, Hawthorne seemed always on the verge of personal bankruptcy.114 Obligated to Collier for the completion of an unfi nished manuscript for which he had already been paid in advance, Hawthorne accelerated the pace of his production as a way of trying to “write himself” out of trouble. The result was an uneven series of volumes, the last of the three in particular revealing in its brusqueness and its passion the special conditions of urgency under which it was written. In many ways, Hawthorne’s United States (1900) was the most important piece of writing he ever completed for the working out of his struggles over spirituality and materialism. He began the history with a lengthy philosophical essay in which he elaborated on the relationship between the ideal and the real as he had developed it in his novels and short stories. The events of the past, Hawthorne argued, were simply neutral occurrences. What transformed events into “history” was the organizational schema historians brought to bear on them. “The facts contained in our best histories bear much the same relation to the history itself that the fl esh and bones of the body bear to the person who lives in and by them,” he wrote. “The fl esh and bones, or the facts have to exist; but the only excuse for their existence is, that the person may have being, or that the history may trace a spiritual growth or decadence.” In this sense, then, the historian was a creator, a life-giver, a resurrector. As the historian breathes “into the dead fact the breath of life,” Hawthorne noted, “it rises from its tomb of centuries,” Lazarus-like, and “does its appointed work in the mighty organism of humanity.” Despite the enormous power this rejuvenating capacity has conferred on the historian, Hawthorne made no special claim for his deductions. Anticipat- 306 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 306306 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM ing Carl Becker by a decade, he argued that every man and every woman had a right to interpret the facts of history in any way meaningful to them. “After all,” he wrote, “the best use of a history is probably to stimulate readers to think for themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that I shall be satisfi ed. . . . The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it according as your faith and hope may dictate.”115 In advancing such relativistic assertions, Hawthorne shared something with New Historians such as Edward Eggleston, who sought to broaden the base of history by focusing on the social behaviors of the “common people,” wherever possible. Both men, for instance, expressed an interest in the everyday lives of those who lived in the colonial period, and both attempted to get at the formative infl uences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the American mind. Unlike Eggleston, however, Hawthorne had little faith that historians could uncover with certainty the true essence of the daily lives of the “mass of the population” during those centuries, especially given that commoners were dominated by a “history of the elect” who kept precious few records about those who “lived from day to day, busied with their private concerns.” The “average” citizens of those eras “serve but as the side scenes and background of the tale,” he admitted, and their interests were subordinated generally to the needs of the privileged few. In a sense, this assertion suggests that Haw- thorne learned the lesson Eggleston had not; namely, that the attempt to write a “total” history of the unvoiced inhabitants of a bygone period for which there are scant materials is unlikely to succeed. Hawthorne observed: “We can depict [the people] in broad lines; we can note the changes of costume and manners from generation to generation; we can brighten the scene with anecdotes and apologues; but these do but serve, in the end, to give substance and fi rmness to our understanding of the dominant and guiding few. To however great a degree we extend our canvas and multiply our fi gures, the result is the same.” Acknowledging a certain “resentment at the restriction, remembering how much more agreeable or not less inthralling would be many a tale of private enterprise,” Hawthorne nonetheless conceded that the history of the colonial era in America was a history of “rulers.”116 Speculations regarding the “inner life” of common people in the colonial period, he inferred, must be left to novelists like his father and to psychological dramas such as The Scarlet Letter.117 The nineteenth century was another matter, however, in part because its history was within the personal memory of many of the readers of Hawthorne’s United States. In presenting assessments of his own age, Hawthorne felt better equipped to reconstruct the social history of private citizens, and like Eggleston, the local-color novelist, he worked hard to establish the “interior reality” of the world around him. The challenge for “modern history,” he believed, was no Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 307

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 307307 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5312:58:53 PMPM longer the scarcity of facts but the “embarrassment” of too many facts and of the diffi culty of not knowing how to make a “judicious selection” among them. His- torians distinguished themselves primarily by the principles of selection they used in sorting through the massive materials of the past. Hawthorne’s personal solutions were at times challenging from a methodological perspective. Mixing metaphors wildly, he noted that the historian “must tell a consecutive story, but must eschew all redundancy, furnish no more supports for his bridge than its stability requires, prune his trees so severely that it shall bear none but good fruit, forbear to freight the memory of his reader with a cargo so unwieldy as to sink it.” In short, the historian did not have the luxury of the novelist to amplify and speculate. That said, Hawthorne also claimed that the historian must not be “too terse,” since “man cannot live by bread alone, and the reader of histories needs to be told the Why as well as the What.” In this sense, historians were obligated, as novelists were not, to raise pertinent questions, seek coherency in their answers and bring closure to their narratives. Arguing that the “history of the United States does mean something,” Hawthorne recycled an organic metaphor of his father’s to challenge historians to go beyond “the enormous mass of facts.” “Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe,” he asked, “or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time?”118 In the introduction to his popular history, Hawthorne acknowledged two dominant schools of thought with respect to these questions bearing on the relationship of idealistic and realistic approaches to the past. If a historian is “imaginative,” he noted of popularizers such as Irving or Bryant, “the picturesque side of things appeals to him; he dissolves the facts and recreates them to suit his conceptions of beauty and harmony, and we have poetry and legend.” Historians of a more analytic point of view, however, such as Gay or Ridpath, “saw the end from the beginning of their narratives; they assigned to their facts their relative place and importance, and merged them into a pervading atmosphere of opinion, based upon the organic relation of cause and effect. Study- ing their works, we are enabled to discern the tendencies and developments of a race, and to note the effects of civilization, character, vice, virtue, and of that sum of them all which we call fate.” The Bible, which Hawthorne identifi ed as the fi rst great work of history, combined both these tendencies. “The facts which [the books of the Bible] relate, often seemly trivial, and disconnected, are really but a material veil, or symbol, concealing a spiritual body of truth, which is neither trivial nor disconnected, but an organized, orderly and catholic revelation of the nature of man, of the processes of his spiritual regeneration, of his fi nal reconciliation with the Divine.” Recognizing the advantages of both picturesque and analytic approaches, Hawthorne concluded his philosophical introduction with a hope not unlike the one advanced in Duyckinck’s “Liter- 308 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 308308 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM ary Prospects of 1845,” that the time will perhaps come “when some inspired man or men will be enabled to handle our modern history with the same esoteric insight which informed the Hebrew scribes, when they used the annals of the obscure tribe to which they belonged as a cover under which to present the relations of God with all the human race, past and to come.”119 In reading through the opening pages of Hawthorne’s United States, one gets the sense that its author aspired to be this esoteric historian. Having devoted his life to the search for spiritual self-consciousness beneath the facade of every day life, he introduced a system of philosophical idealism into his histories to explain the nation’s steady growth toward platonic self-realization. From its earliest days, Hawthorne noted, the nation was, in a Kierkegaardian sense, ever in the process of becoming. The United States “is the conscious incarnation of a sublime idea—the conception of civil and religious liberty,” he wrote. “It is a spirit ﬁ rst, and a body afterward; thus following the true law of immortal growth.” In a perfect expression of the transcendental philosophy familiar to his father, Hawthorne added: “The spirit, for the sake of which the body exists, more and more dominates its material basis, until at last the latter practically vanishes ‘in the light of its meaning sublime.’ This is the apotheosis of history, which of course has not yet been attained, and probably can never be more than approximated.” But approximate Hawthorne tried, arguing that his history would emphasize the spirit of American beliefs over crass obsession with the nation’s physical attributes. “Some sort of recognition of the American Idea, and of the American destiny, affords the only proper ground for American patriotism,” he noted in his introduction. “We talk of the size of our country, of its wealth and prosperity, of its physical power, of its enlighten- ment, but if these things be all that we have to be proud of, we have little. They are in truth but outward signs of a far more precious possession within. We are the pioneers of the new Day, or we are nothing worth talking about.”120 To Hawthorne, the “spirit” of democracy was a divine one, and the history of the United States in his own day was therefore a providential unraveling of dramatic intent as it had been for William Cullen Bryant. “[A]t heart the voice of democracy is the voice of God,” he wrote with messianic fervor. “It may be silent for long, so that some will disbelieve or despair, and say in their haste that democracy is a fraud or a failure. But at last its tone will be heard, and its word will be irresistible and immortal: the word of the Lord, uttering itself through the mouth of His creatures.” And, as in all matters of divine will, there was an unabashed predestinarian quality to the history presented by Haw- thorne. “In these volumes, I have taken the view that the American nation is the embodiment and vehicle of a Divine purpose to emancipate and enlighten the human race. Man is entering upon a new career of spiritual freedom,” Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 309

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 309309 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM Hawthorne proclaimed: “he is to enjoy a hitherto unprecedented condition of political, social and moral liberty—as distinguished from license, which in truth is slavery. The stage for this grand evolution was fi xed in the Western Continent, and the pioneers who went thither were inspired with the desire to escape from the thralldom of the past, and to nourish their souls with that pure and exquisite freedom which can afford to ignore the ease of the body, and all temporal luxuries, for the sake of that elixir of immortality. This, according to my thinking, is the innermost core of the American Idea,” Hawthorne recorded. Narrating the history of America, then, was analogous to undertaking an exegesis of the “spiritual body of truth” in the Bible. And since “good alone has a root, connecting it with the eternal springs of life,” he concluded, “in the end it prevails, and the movement of the race is on the whole, and in the lapse of time, toward better conditions.”121 Ignorance of the spiritual power of a people, Hawthorne suggested, “is the inevitable conclusion of materialistic logic.” Because he valued things of the spirit, he argued in Hawthorne’s United States that the “most dangerous enemy of America has been . . . our own material prosperity.” From the very beginning of American intellectual life, base human needs had overwhelmed the power of ideas. Hence Hawthorne’s Columbus was absorbed with “lofty and unselfi sh” thoughts and emotions “as he knelt on that coral beach” in the Caribbean on his day of discovery. “But before the man of destiny had risen from his knees, he had ceased to act as the instrument of God, and had begun to think of personal emoluments,” Hawthorne noted, moralizing that “adver- sity set his name among the stars, and prosperity abased his soul to dust. The remaining years of his life were a fruitless struggle to secure what he deemed his rightful wages—to coin his immortal exploit into ducats; and his end was sorrowful and dishonored.” Spanish explorers, Hawthorne maintained, who had gold as their only passion, never perceived the greater spiritual wealth of the emerging region. Their love of gold “derived from the ‘Dark Ages,’ ” and as “they toiled through swamps, they cut their way through woods, they scaled precipices, they fought savages, they starved and died,” these deluded conquistadors “still sought the gleam of the precious metal.” The settlers of Jamestown were likened to “the emigrants to the Klondike gold-fi elds in our own day,” building a colony “designed only to better their fortunes and then depart,” while even the devotional Pilgrims asked themselves on occasion “whether a cold abstraction was worth adopting in lieu of the great, warm, kindly world?” A promising abatement of this lust for money occurred during the Revolution, Hawthorne noted, since, while the “Spirit of Liberty was threatened from without, she was safe and triumphant.” But when the struggle for independence was concluded, “a foe far more insidious began to plot 310 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 310310 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM against her in her own house”—the monied interests and later trusts against which Bryant had warned and those “noxious creatures” that “creep out” to proclaim the “exalted maxim . . . that all Americans could be rich” and that encouraged “the spectacle . . . of a mighty and generous nation fi ghting one another for more material wealth.”122 Antimaterialism conditioned nearly every aspect of Hawthorne’s vision of popular history. Historical fi gures were classifi ed as either heroes or villains depending on their affi nities with the spiritual principles guiding the young nation and their willingness to sacrifi ce material success for greater spiritual good.123 Heroes revealed daily their divine associations with destiny and destiny’s attendants. George Washington, for instance, was a man of “blameless character, steady, courageous and observant, wise in judgment and of mature mind,” whose actions revealed “a fortune, an inspiration, a spiritual quickening, such as come to no man by natural inheritance, but solely as a Divine endowment for the emergency as it arises.” At the Battle of Quebec, General Wolfe failed physically, but through his death he completed a spiritual mission, acting with the heart of a hero “who knows that the culminating moment of his destiny has arrived.” At such a crisis point, Hawthorne noted “the mortal part of the man is transfi gured by the towering spirit, and his eyes pierce through the veils of things. His life lies beneath him, and he contemplates its vicissitudes with the high tranquility of an immortal freedom. What is death to him who has already triumphed over the fetters of the fl esh, and tasted the drink of immortality? He is the trustee of the purpose of God; and the guerdon his deed deserves can be nothing less noble than to die.”124 This description of Wolfe’s death shared far more with Benjamin West’s dramatic painting than it did with Edward Ellis’s speculations about the base and vindictive murder of Wolfe by his own soldier. Hawthorne experienced none of the doubts that Simon Schama later expressed about the validity of the transfi guration of Wolfe or concerns about “the irrecoverable distance between events and their narration” with respect to the Plains of Abraham which prompted Schama to speculate on “the death of certainty.”125 Wolfe’s death for Hawthorne was an expression of the spirit in its purest and most unadulterated form. Conversely, villains in Hawthorne’s United States were those out of step with emerging American ideals or obsessed with earthly and material gains to the exclusion of spiritual values. Revealing some of his father’s deep-seated contempt for the Puritans as a hypocritical people, Julian condemned theo- cratic leaders in seventeenth-century New England who “created an oligarchy of the most insidious and unassailable type: a communion of earthly ‘saints,’ who might be, and occasionally were, satans at heart.” Unable to suppress their inner Dimmesdales, such antiheroes were exposed to a corrupted spirit which Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 311

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 311311 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM acted “like some subtle contagion in the remotest recesses of the forest, and those who went to live there became affected with it.” In Hawthorne’s estimation, Cotton Mather was “the sensible incarnation” of “the evil tendencies of Puritanism” in all its “hideousness.” Had justice prevailed in the Salem witch trials, Hawthorne concluded uncharitably, “that noose, slimy with death-sweat of a score of innocent victims, would have settled greedily round his own guilty neck, and strangled his life.” Governor Berkeley of Virginia was “as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies,” since, in squashing the rebellion of Bacon and his accomplices, he sought the “means to torture their minds while destroying their bodies,” in the process focusing on “his pecuniary advantage,” while “his thievish fi ngers grasped all the valuables that his murderous instincts brought within his power.” Likening Berkeley’s selfi sh tendencies “to those of a fi end from the Pit, permitted for a season to affl ict the earth,” he declared the governor a “base” and “wicked” man, “a thief” who “perjured, as well as an insatiable murderer” and whose actions were “to be attributed to the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to run amuck.” Benedict Arnold received none of the benefi t of the doubt afforded him by Simms. In Hawthorne’s view, Arnold operated from “coarse and brutal” instincts, and when he “retired to England, a stench in all men’s nostrils,” he remained “insensible to considerations of honor or of shame,” having “regretted his abominable treason no more than he scrupled to commit it.” Arnold’s companion in treason, Major John Andre, fared no better. “Con- cerning this young man, a great deal of silly sentiment has been vented during the past century,” Hawthorne noted, adding: “it must be said that Andre was a man of worthless character, destitute of honor or scruple, and presenting all the characteristics of a smooth, insinuating, conscienceless scamp. He died the death of dishonor which he richly deserved.”126 Slavery provided a still more glaring example of the corrupting infl uence of materialism. Enforced servitude appeared innocuously enough in nearly all the colonies in the early seventeenth century, Hawthorne noted, but it eventually became like a “Frankenstein monster” which “must be fed and given room to stretch his shackled but formidable limbs.” Forced to live with the spiritual consequences of the “calamity of slavery,” the nation experienced daily the ravages of its corrupt system. “Our ancestors had not suffered from hunger and Indi- ans, from royal oppression, from insolent war, to have the work of their blood and brains and hearts destroyed by the shallow and infi del impatience of a hot- headed and arrogant minority,” Hawthorne reasoned in the manner of Gay. “These planters were not the nation, for they were willing to destroy the nation; their attitude was not buttressed by the august and deep-laid foundations of history, for they cast history aside, and acted from the selfi sh and immediate 312 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 312312 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM impulse of personal comfort and prosperity.” Motivated by the fi nancial returns of a corrupt system, “they would destroy the edifi ce of ages, in which were involved the purest hopes of mankind.” The result was the American Civil War, an epic struggle between the forces of spirituality and materialism that Julian had once been anxious to enter but which now appeared to him in retrospect as a “hideous work of mutual destruction” that threatened to “annihilate the work their great fathers had made.” The outcome was terrifying but inevitable. “The North, indeed, had physical resources not possessed by the South; but these could not have been called forth, nor kept in action, had not a profound spiritual conviction of right and duty animated them as soul animates body,” Hawthorne argued. John Brown’s “body mouldered in its grave, but his soul, militant still, marched from battlefi eld to battlefi eld, and witnessed the sacrifi ce of hundreds of thousands of human lives, poured out to defend or to defeat the cause for the sake of which he had put his head in the halter,” he added.127 Occasionally Hawthorne’s insistence on the importance of the spiritual over the material led him to some shortsighted assessments of character. He spoke of women in silly terms, for instance, valuing the very real diplomatic achievements of Isabella of Castile’s reign far less than Irving’s depiction of her “feminine imagination” that allowed her to fi nd value in Columbus’s quixotic dream. “Had she known more, she would have done less,” Hawthorne concluded in conspicuously sexist language. He was still more outspoken concerning the failings of Andrew Jackson’s cabinet, whose members “were absolutely impotent to convert or constrain” the “curtain-lectures” of their wives in the matter of Peggy Eaton. “[T]hough Jackson could defeat British regulars at New Orleans, dominate his Cabinet and overpower Congress, there was one thing he was not strong enough to do, and that was, to make fi ne ladies behave with human charity toward a woman,” argued Hawthorne. Noting the pettiness of women everywhere when it came to personal politics, he characterized their malice “as impalpable as a mephitic vapor, which is nevertheless fatal,” adding that “the white doves of rank and fashion are more bloodthirsty and merciless than harpies when a chance offers to destroy one of their own sex.” You may manage a man easily enough, he noted; “you can call him out and shoot him if he is unreasonable; but woman is unassailable, and profi ts by that fact.” And whenever Hawthorne intended to dismiss some group or cause for its petty ambitions, he often did so with reference to the grasping behavior of women. “South Carolina had prattled of secession, no doubt, as a pretty woman threatens her husband with leaving him if he does not buy her a new bonnet,” he wrote; “but nothing serious was meant.”128 Hawthorne was equally dismissive of Native Americans, whom he characterized as primitive anachronisms out of touch with the spiritual mission of the

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 313313 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM nineteenth century. While Hawthorne conceded that there were some Native Americans of ability and awareness, he believed, as Ridpath had expressed in the Popular History of the United States, that as a race they had few redeeming qualities and no lasting infl uence on human history. “Amid the roars and fever of these latter ages, they stand silent, useless, and apathetic.” An Indian such as Tecumseh “was one of the most admirable fi gures among all Ameri- can red men” and “we may give him the credit of being an honorable and worthy foeman,” Hawthorne acknowledged; yet he added with Sheridan-like ruthlessness: “probably he, too, was better dead than alive.” In Hawthorne’s estimation, there was no redeeming quality in Native Americans suffi cient to overcome the iniquities of their natures or to close the gap between races. “Seas are shallow and continents but a span compared with the breadths and depths which separate him from you,” Hawthorne counseled readers. “The sphinx will yield her mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch the poles of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same God that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge the gulf between you, you will learn something of God’s infi nitude.”129 This vitriolic attitude toward Native Americans had much to do with Haw- thorne’s feeling that they were obsessed with physical brutality and were resistant to the uplifting qualities of the pervasive democratic spirit in America. Given his own perverse obsession with writing about gruesome death in connection with tribal warfare, a trait he shared with Ellis, the criticism was ironic at best. Hawthorne was not shy about describing in graphic detail the “blood and mangled corpses” that desecrated the hearths of frontier homes during King Philip’s War, for instance, nor the “pools of blood which the frost had congealed” and which later “bubbled” in the heat of subsequent confl agrations. Discussion of an Indian raid on Schenectady in the 1690s elicited a description of the “vicious swish and crash of the murderous tomahawk, followed by the dexterous twist of the scalping-knife, and the snatching of the tuft of hair from the bleeding skull.” And, as if unconvinced that this description of the horrors of an Indian assault was suffi cient in its detail to convey the gruesomeness of the event, he added, as an afterthought: “That is all—but, no: there still remains a baby or two who must be caught up by the leg, and have its brains dashed out on the door-jamb.” With reference to a winter attack on Deerfi eld, Massa- chusetts, Hawthorne wondered aloud “how many motionless corpses” and “in what ghastly attitudes, lay huddled in the darksome rooms of the little houses, or were tossed upon the trodden snow without, the looks of mortal agony frozen on their features?” Still not satisfi ed with the morbidity of this requiem to the dead, he concluded with more lurid detail: “But you will hear the howl of the wolves by-and-by; and the black bear will come shuffl ing and sniffi ng 314 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 314314 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM through the broken doors; and when the feast is over, there will be, in place of these poses of death, only disordered heaps of gnawed bones, and shreds of garments rent asunder, and the grin of half-eaten skulls.” Given the gruesome consequences of savage tendencies, Hawthorne urged readers not to waste any sentiment on these vile creatures or to admit them into the spiritual community of democratic virtue.130 These viscious attitudes toward women and Native Americans may have alienated him from some readers, especially professional ones, although his out- spokenness endeared him to others who shared his prejudices. In an industry positively crowded with dry, factual texts that drew heavily on one another, Haw- thorne’s subjective approach was attractive to many. Even those opposed to his opinions could not ignore the literary fl air with which he presented them. Only Hawthorne among popular historians was capable of describing Peter Stuyves- ant as “seamed and knotty, with a famous wooden leg which all New Yorkers, at any rate, love to hear stumping down the corridors of time.” Hawthorne alone could depict the death scene of Queen Elizabeth with the refl ection that “as Elizabeth’s last breath rattled in her throat, the mourners had one ear cocked toward the window, to hear what sort of a voice James was speaking.” Concern- ing the Gallic custom that required Ben Franklin to kiss Voltaire, he wrote with characteristic humor: “One can imagine the demure amusement which Franklin must have derived from this incident; but he performed the act with his invari- able grave decorum; if one must kiss a man once in one’s life, perhaps it was as well to make the essay upon Voltaire as upon any other.” And how could readers resist a text that noted of the “Era of Good Feelings” that the “lamb was not afraid of being eaten, and the lion turned out to be fond of vegetables”?131 Accused of striving too hard to achieve a “picturesque effect” in his novels, Julian Hawthorne was guilty sometimes of the same tendency in his histories. In narrating the Courtship of Myles Standish and John Alden’s pursuit of Pris- cilla, for instance, Hawthorne favored the romantic treatments of Longfellow and Jane Goodwin Austin over the more restrained handling by professional scholars.132 “We can imagine how this situation would be handled by the analytic novelists of our day,” Hawthorne wrote; “how they would spread Alden’s heart and conscience out on paper, and dry them, and pick them to pieces.” Hawthorne praised the “tender allegories, sweet household rhymes, melodious epics, [and] psalms of life” of Longfellow’s romantic poetry which “turned life into harmony, showed the silver lining of the cloud, drew hopeful morals from the problems of existence, made the wild or stern legends of the past blossom with delicate fl owers of fancy and rhetoric.” Lest readers assume that he was violating his own principle of grounding the ideal in the real, Hawthorne reminded them that Longfellow composed poetry such as “Evangeline” about Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 315

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 315315 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM people like the Arcadians, who experienced “naked and terrible realities” that “gave the poet space and inspiration.” It is the romantic poet “who seizes the inchoate and discordant affairs of mankind, and compels them to assume form and harmony,” demonstrating the spirituality behind cold, harsh realities. In the works of Bryant and Longfellow, Hawthorne added, the “matter-of-fact, prosaic Nineteenth Century vanishes as we read, and the great days of classic heroism are present with us once more. But, indeed,” he concluded, borrowing language from his father’s True Stories in Biography and History, “they are never absent, so long as human souls are brave and devoted.”133 Hawthorne also appropriated certain romantic tropes and techniques from his father’s fi ction, including elaborate organic metaphors of growth and decay, discourses on introspection and transmitted sin, and refl ections on the perverse. One is conscious of the critic’s warning about trying to fi nd too much of the father in everything the son wrote, but it is undeniable that there was a distinct legacy with respect to anti-Puritanism that Julian did little to disavow. Most readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne were aware that the novelist’s paternal great-grandfather, Judge John Hathorne, had been one of the preliminary hearing judges at the 1692 trials of Salem’s accused and persecuted “witches,” and many, such as Charles Francis Adams Jr., suspected that the ignominious distinction of this legacy was responsible for the anxiety and remorse in the judge’s ancestors and accounted for the evocative negative portraits of Puri- tans that appeared in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels.134 The antagonist in The House of the Seven Gables, for instance, Judge Pyncheon, was depicted as a “sternly-resentful,” “iron-hearted,” “strong-willed” Puritan.”135 Julian Haw- thorne’s portrait of a typical seventeenth-century Puritan echoed this sentiment and language, complete with “the steeple crowned hat, the severe brow, the steady eyes, the pointed beard, the dark cloak and sad-hued garments.” With self-implicating candor, Julian referred to “those terrifi c magistrates whose grim decrees gave New England naughty children the nightmare a century after the stern-browed promulgators of them were dust.”136 Hezekiah But- terworth, author of A Popular History of America in The Popular Historical Series attempted to refute Julian’s (and Nathaniel’s) anti-Puritanism by offering a more sympathetic portrait of the Massachusetts Bay founders and the Salem witchcraft incident, but he admitted that the Hawthorne stereotype was diffi cult to overcome.137 In addition to these parental borrowings, Julian drew extensively from the narrative conventions of popular historians, many of whose works he had read and absorbed. He experimented with authorial point of view in ways reminiscent of John Frost, for instance, placing an imaginary balloonist above the battlefi eld at Bunker Hill and providing a speculative bird’s-eye account of 316 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 316316 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5412:58:54 PMPM the fi ghting. Theatrical conventions worthy of William Cullen Bryant were also employed by Hawthorne, who used dramaturgical language to highlight his points about the power of the spirit in America. Reminding readers that “[u]pon the stage of the world, each one acts his appointed part,” Hawthorne condemned Citizen Genet as “a grotesque, theatrical little punchinello”; Aaron Burr was “a dramatic freak of destiny, in the most dramatic period of history”; and John Randolph, clothed in the “stage attire of a dissolute groom, his eyes leering with intoxication,” proved a “low-comedy actor of genius” in his debates with Clay, “with a native wit and readiness which could sting and amuse. By ill luck, he shambled into politics, instead of on the stage.” These melodramatic devices, which Gay had tried so hard to exorcize from the prose of Bryant, were introduced by Hawthorne as a way of revivifying the past through the transforming power of the written word.138 Edward Ellis’s concept of a timeless past also informed the temporal structuring of Hawthorne’s United States, the author noting that, like Ulysses, “we are part of all that we have met; and the memory of the things that we have known, including the opinions we have formed of them, passes before us toward the end of the journey, not in chronological order (not by intention, but haphazard), the things of today arm in arm with those of childhood or of age, and thereby sometimes gaining new signifi cance. Memory is a queer creature,” he concluded, “hard to keep within the confi nes of sequence.”139 Hawthorne believed implicitly in the “empire of the pen” as a device for conveying the spiritual content of history, and some of the most memorable descriptive writing in any popular history of the United States appears in Hawthorne’s United States. The ascent of Wolfe’s men up the cliffs surrounding Quebec during the French and Indian War, for instance, is depicted in the present tense and with an urgency that bespoke the immediacy of battle. “With panting lungs man after man tops the ascent and sees the darkling plain and forms in line with his comrades, while still the stream winds up endlessly from the depths below,” Hawthorne wrote. “The earth is giving birth to an army.” Sensational death scenes were Hawthorne’s specialty and eclipsed even the most gruesome pictures of war as imagined by George Lippard. As the Brit- ish soldiers spilled out of the guardhouse during the Boston Massacre, “the sinister intent which was manifest in their look and bearing sent a strange thrill through the multitude,” Hawthorne wrote, adding with a gothic air of mystery: “It is said that a fi gure was seen to come out on the balcony of the custom house, his face concealed by a veil hanging down over it, and [fl ed] into the retreating throng. The open space in front of the soldiers was overhung with smoke, which slowly dissolved away, and revealed eleven New England- ers stretched along the trodden snow of their native town. Some tried to rise; Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 317

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 317317 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM others lay still. Blood fl owed from their wounds, smoking in the icy air, and the tinging the white snow red. The deed had been done.” The long slope of Breed’s Hill during the Battle of Bunker Hill was described by Hawthorne as “a ghastly sight; red-coated bodies were lying there by scores, and within fi fty feet of the turf wall they were massed in heaps. Some of them still stirred; an arm was lifted, a head was raised, and sank again. But most of them lay quite motionless in the broad, pitiless sun.”140 In constructing such graphic word-paintings, Hawthorne was not above adding speculative details to aid the imagination. In describing the fi rst meeting between the Pilgrims and the English-speaking Samoset, for instance, Haw- thorne provided visual detail not found in any contemporary literary accounts of the event. While Samoset spoke, noted Hawthorne, “a chipmunk fl itted along the bole of a fallen tree, a thrush chirped in the brake, a deer, passing airy- footed across an opening in the forest, looked an instant and then turned and plunged fl eetly away amid the boughs, and a lean-bellied wolf, prospecting for himself and his friends, stuck his sinister snout through a clump of underbrush, and curled his lips above the long row of the white teeth in an ugly grin.” This was pure fi ction and literary embellishment. Then Hawthorne attributed the appropriate moral meaning to the scene by adding: “This friendship boded no good to him.” Elsewhere in describing the rebuke by Bostonians of three royal commissioners sent from England to enforce stricter colonial control, Hawthorne wrote that “a great crowd began to make its way toward the court house, whose portals frowned upon the narrow street, as if the stern spirit of justice that presided within had cast a shadow beneath them. The doors were closed, and the massive lock which secured them gleamed in the single ray of spring sunshine that slanted along the facade of the edifi ce.”141 The imputing of emotions to buildings was not only befi tting the son of the man who wrote The House of the Seven Gables, it was revealing of Hawthorne’s thesis that behind all material things were spiritual conditions that refl ected the ideational destiny of the American people. For sheer descriptive talent, Julian Hawthorne had few peers in the entire history of popular historical literature, and his United States gained a reputation for being the most spirited if not always the most controlled treatment of American history at the turn of the century. If on occasion Hawthorne went too far in sensationalizing historical events, in the process violating his own insistence on a scholarship of the ideal as grounded in the real, he did so because he had doubts about the power of more restrained language to convey adequately the spiritual meaning of Amer- ica. Many of Hawthorne’s paragraphs in United States begin with the phrase “words cannot refl ect the true meaning,” and he admitted throughout the text to being frustrated constantly by the elusiveness of the spiritual essences he 318 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 318318 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM was trying to capture in concrete prose. Put simply, the substantive form of language proved inappropriate to the conveyance of ephemeral ideals. Some- times Hawthorne attempted to deal with this obstacle by employing adverbial descriptions such as “rightfully” or “wrongfully” in the most blatant and least ambiguous manner. He also was a master of the use of paradox and irony as means for conveying the complexity of spiritual ideals.142 These were tricky literary challenges to overcome, and Hawthorne seems to have been aware that the methods he and other popularizers used to describe the past were not always adequate to the task. Frequently they relied on the novelistic conventions of the imagination associated with the aging works of Irving, Cooper, and Na- thaniel Hawthorne. “Instead of maintaining the omniscient third-person viewpoint necessary to equate history with the past,” therefore, Hawthorne and his compatriots employed “a personalized, conversational, avowedly subjective style” that had gone out of fashion by the turn of the century. To borrow from Patrick Finney’s critique of another work, Hawthorne’s United States “is littered with fi rst-person pronouns, literary fl ourishes and philosophical digres- sions,” and “systematically draws attention to the constructed and therefore relative and contingent nature of his account.”143 In light of the frequent failure of language, Hawthorne deferred at times to pictorial effect, although the choice of illustrations for Hawthorne’s United States proved equally vexing with respect to the conveyance or spiritual meaning. Hawthorne recognized the need for popular histories to include illustrations; he and his publisher P. F. Collier disagreed, however, about how many and what kinds of illustrations to use in the popular history. In general, Haw- thorne distrusted any art that attempted to objectify that which was ethereal and ephemeral in nature, such as an illustration that purported to convey an emotional state. For Hawthorne, the act of refl ecting historically was a pure and spiritual exercise, but the business of translating historical ideas into images for public consumption was essentially mechanical and corrupting. A case in point was the incongruity between text and image that occurred in illustrating Pocahontas rescuing John Smith. In the text of his popular history, Hawthorne informed readers that the Pocahontas story presented particular challenges to any illustrator, since “it has been repeated all over the world for nearly three hundred years and has formed the subject of innumerable pictures.” The effort of illustrators to outdo one another in depicting the sentimentality of the scene, Hawthorne noted, had encouraged a sad competition of escalating mawkish- ness which had caused many, in turn, “to discredit or modify” the Smith story. For Hawthorne, John Smith’s rescue was a tale that needed little visual amplifi - cation. The Pocahontas rescue scene was “simple enough in itself, and not at all improbable,” he argued, adding that “there is no question as to the reality of the Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 319

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 319319 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM dramatis personae of the story, and their relations one to another render such an episode as was alleged hardly more than might reasonably be looked for.” In Hawthorne’s estimation, the only obligation an illustrator of the scene had was to depict the episode as it “might reasonably” have occurred. This meant including recognition of the fact that Pocahontas was but a “young” girl of ten at the time of the incident. Yet despite these clearly articulated concerns for visual accuracy, the W. L. Hudson illustration selected by Collier was one in which the Indian maiden was presented as a full-ﬁ gured woman and Smith was depicted in a highly dramatized death struggle. Hudson’s version of the scene had more in common with the melodramatic style of William Cullen Bryant (who disdained “terrible image breakers” such as Sydney Howard Gay) than with the “simple” and “reasonable” standard Hawthorne argued for in the text itself.144 Other images in the volumes bore out the criticism of the reviewer Edwin E. Sparks that the visual representations in Hawthorne’s United States were little more than “[s]tock illustrations and entirely imaginary.”145 In the case of “Arrest- ing a Woman Charged with Witchcraft,” for instance, the art editors at Collier’s selected a piece that depicted the Puritans as heartless zealots who victimized defenseless elderly women in a campaign of ruthless hysteria. In this illustration the artist’s sympathies lie completely with the accused—the victimized woman who clings desperately to her chair, barely able to support herself in the face of accusations by self-righteous Puritan leaders. And yet Julian Hawthorne, who was sensitive to the fact that this sad episode involved his ancestor as a Salem judge and who had severely condemned the Puritans for their behavior, had warned in the text of his popular history that readers had an obligation at least to consider why the Puritans had acted in the ways they had. “Why may they not have believed they were in the right?” he questioned, especially in light of Mather’s deceptive machinations. In addition, Hawthorne noted that the witchcraft hysteria ushered in “the dawn of human sympathies, and the growth of spiritual humility,” forces unrepresented in the drawing chosen by Collier’s staff. The Puritan elders have none of the dignity and rectitude described by Hawthorne as characteristic of the Puritans who committed overzealous acts but in the name of godliness and who sought forgiveness once they discovered the errors of their ways. No true friend of the Puritans (what nineteenth-century Hawthorne could be?), Julian nonetheless accused their victims (especially the Quakers) of sometimes attaching “more value to their willingness to endure ill- usage than to the spiritual principle for avouching which they were ill-used.”146 Nothing suggested more the relativistic aspects of Hawthorne’s United States, as well as the potential shortcomings of language and art for depicting spiritual themes, than the presentist elements in the narrative. Because in the case of contemporary circumstances “there has been no opportunity to collate

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 320320 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM evidence and cancel out the incompatible features,” Julian noted, “the diffi - culty of comprehending the meaning of events increases” while the distracting power of forces like materialism intensifi es. Contemporary history often becomes “a meaningless juggle of accidents,” he argued, “which it would be worth no man’s while to recount or disentangle.” To avoid such entangle- ments, Hawthorne tried to elucidate the broad spiritual values of his age which informed the petty concerns of local regions or events. A case in point was his attitude toward American imperialism in the 1890s. An unabashed expan- sionist like Edward Ellis, Hawthorne saw it as his duty as a historian to convince Americans of their responsibilities to the world. “It was inevitable that America should not be confi ned to any special area on the map of the world,” Hawthorne noted, since “America is not a geographical expression, and arbitrary geographical boundaries should not be permitted to limit the area which her principles control.” According to Hawthorne, national boundaries were merely material obstacles to the spread of conquering ideas, and such barriers must give way ultimately to the diffusion of spiritual values in order for history to be vindicated. The goal, he argued, should be to “institute other Americas in the very strongholds of oppression.” To accomplish this, Hawthorne urged Americans to “obtain foothold in remote regions, there to disseminate their genius and include their aims,” even if war was the inevitable outcome.147 By this last comment Hawthorne intended, of course, a defense of the recent war in Cuba. Like Ellis, he viewed the confl ict as a legitimate military action against a corrupt Spanish government because he linked oppressors in Cuba with their materialistic, gold-mongering predecessors, the conquistadors. It was Hawthorne’s historical sensitivity to four centuries of depravation which made him especially attuned to the spiritual obligations of Americans in the Caribbean and which in his estimation allowed him to see past the shortsighted, seemingly petty materialistic rationale for involvement. Others like Eggleston viewed Haw- thorne’s position as anything but sensitive. Evidencing some of the most blatant racism of any popularizer of history, Hawthorne argued that “the Spanish nature is a kind of disease, which has long affl icted the human race, and is now happily on the verge of fi nal extinction.” Cuba was a nation in need of rescuing, Haw- thorne noted, since “Cubans are not a pure race, and the admixture of negro blood with Spanish does not promise well for strength and constancy of character.” Americans were justifi ed in their defense of Cuba, he argued, because the United States had long been “restive under this chronic sore, festering close under her eyes.” Vampire-like, Spain had “evinced the strongest disinclination to relinquishing the victim whose blood she had sucked so long,” and because no other European nation “would come to Cuba’s rescue,” the well-meaning citizens of the United States, “who detest outrage and injustice for their own Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 321

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 321321 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM sakes,” were forced to support her. To the argument made by Eggleston and others that Americans had no other motivation to be in Cuba other than greed, Hawthorne responded that while avarice was a disturbing contemporary quality, a “more disinterested and honorable war was never undertaken; and it was strictly in harmony with the traditions and mission of America.”148 Finally, as a latter-day transcendentalist prone to idealistic refl ections, Haw- thorne claimed a special license to speculate about the future of the Ameri- can enterprise. As Ellis had done, Hawthorne predicted that the war of 1898 foreshadowed other international confl icts in which Americans, of necessity, must become involved—including those of Europe, where “it seems reasonable that England and America would be found standing side by side.” “Were the French nation not as fi ckle as it is sensitive to new ideas, it would unite with America in controlling the world to-day,” he advised. “But it is in England, and not in France, that the principles of human liberty are really rooted; and she, and not France, must be our fi nal companion in the leadership of mankind.” Predicting that “[i]f a great world-struggle be at hand, or should it ever come, we cannot hope to hold wholly aloof from it,” Hawthorne argued that “the good of the human race requires that when we do take our part in it, it shall be decisive of the objects involved.” Americans are “capable, upon occasion, of fi ghting and dying for an abstract idea,” he noted, but they must hear the “magnetic word that shall unite all in accomplishing such conditions” and see “the leader whom all cannot choose but follow.” Such a leader would have to face the harsh fact that at the turn of the century, when “the adjustments of life are fi ner than they were, we are confronted by hitherto untried situations, and we are consequently arrested in a fog of perplexities and wanton experiments.” Hawthorne concluded in a speculative vein: “At the moment that this book is fi nished, this nation has come to the end of one period of its growth, and is arrived at the threshold of another. Fifty or a hundred years from now we shall be able to look back and understand the position we occupy at this moment; and we shall probably see, then, that not one new thing, but many, awaited us. The next century may be expected to be not only different, but very different from the last.”149 In this prediction of profound change he was right, of course, but he was correct in ways that presaged the obsolescence of the very literary genre he used to describe it so profoundly.

“The Rubbish of Things”

Though Hawthorne was almost clairvoyant in his predictions about the First World War, he was not nearly so prescient regarding his reputation as a

322 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 322322 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM historian. Faced with the irony of trying to explain the inadequacy of repre- sentational forms by means of the very constructs he was rejecting, Hawthorne failed to make a convincing literary case for his idealist agenda. For this reason, some critics condemned Hawthorne’s United States as whimsical, polemical, and inaccurate. Edwin E. Sparks, for instance, wrote that “the style is that of a series of essays, verbose, dramatic, often lacking chronological order, and presupposing no little familiarity with the general facts,” adding that the work “[r]epresents the extreme ‘popular’ historical writing which aims to be readable rather than scholarly.”150 Another reviewer noted that Hawthorne relied too heavily on secondary sources rather than on primary research in constructing his arguments, in the process amplifying the errors of others and calling into question once again his commitment to truth. According to this line of reasoning, Hawthorne’s history was original only in the way that an iconoclast’s views are original—as impious points of departure from the established writings of others. He is “unadvised as to dates,” which “is an important matter in history,” the critic warned of the writer who had forsaken the Bem Method, and he gets “terribly mixed” in his statements, “some false, some true.” Among other things, the inattentive Hawthorne had killed off General Ewell at the Battle of Groveton Woods in the Civil War, even though “this same killed man became a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army, succeeding to the command of Stonewall Jackson, and survived the surrender at Appomattox.”151 In addition, reviewers pointed to the irony of Hawthorne’s designation of himself as a historian with training in fi ction rather than a fi ction writer with historical interests. In April 1900, Ada Shurmer published an article in the Scots Magazine titled “The Reading of Historical Novels and the Study of His- tory,” in which clear distinctions were made between historians and novelists. By Shumer’s standards, Julian Hawthorne qualifi ed as the latter but not the former.152 This bifurcation represented an important departure from the long- held conception of history and fi ction as kindred spirits. In an article titled “Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made,” a writer for the New York Times reminded readers that history is “generally understood to signify a compilation of facts—events of the past, actual things, actions of men and nations.” In this sense, “[h]istory differs from fi ction in the fact that one is supposed to be true and the other does not pretend to be other than a sham.” Hawthorne confused the two, according to S. H. Pendleton, taking advantage of the naivete of his middle-class audience in the process. “When an ignorant man writes so-called history, he misleads other people and unwittingly deceives those who are equally ignorant. When a one-sided or malignant man writes so-called history and perverts the truth or suppresses any part of it, he is equally with the ignorant one an unfi t teacher. It is always more diffi cult to rid people of error than Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 323

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 323323 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM to teach the truth from the beginning; therefore any so-called writer of history who is himself either ignorant or prejudiced and malignant is a malefactor, or, in more gentle terms, a worker of evil.” These conditions, Pendleton noted, were “suggested by a cursory glance at Nations of the World—Hawthorne’s United States.” To Julian Hawthorne’s claim that his spiritual ruminations emanated in large part from real conditions, making the structure of his discourse nearly transparent to and consistent with the events he described, Pendleton quipped: “If it is history, why not tell the truth, the whole, and nothing else? With so much being amiss in the few pages scanned it seems wise to regard the whole book rather dubiously.”153 Most important, irony also shrouded the conditions of production under which Hawthorne worked. Though in his narrative he eschewed processes of materialism and fetishism of objects which characterized contemporary culture—noting that the “vast, inorganic mass” of American history was like a “body without a soul” in which competition obscured the “guiding spirit within it”—Hawthorne’s United States was nonetheless a direct product of these forces.154 Like the nation itself, popular history as a genre was so conditioned by material concerns (publication deadlines, sales rates, profi t margins, etc.) that spiritual ends were frequently obscured in them. Books were part of what David Shi has referred to as the “aesthetic of things” in the late nineteenth century, with publishing houses “imprint[ing] the myriad surfaces and values of the material world into public consciousness and artistic expression” with each volume they marketed. In the late Victorian era, Shi notes, the “monied classes fi lled their parlors and drawing-rooms with Turkish ottomans and divans, over- stuffed upholstery, fringed carpets and curtains, picture albums, Currier and Ives lithographs, porcelain fi gurines, painted plates, ceramic bud vases, mirrors, and upright pianos,” and popular histories became an important element of these accumulations.155 Julian Hawthorne’s nonfi ction prose contributed to the very forces of materialism that his content matter rejected, making Hawthorne’s United States an ironic collaborator in the late nineteenth century’s “ethic of avid consumption,” with the past, as it were, “offering one more consumerist arena.”156 Such works “exploited and sanctifi ed the ‘concrete, commonplace, every-day, matter-of-fact way of thinking,’ ” a journalist from Scribner’s noted, undercutting further the idealism Hawthorne sought to install.157 Hawthorne was stubbornly confi dent, however, that with the proper vigi- lance, one could avoid the most pernicious effects of consumerism in the popular book market. The true value of our history “does not manifestly appear to our contemporary vision,” Hawthorne pointed out, because “it is overloaded with the rubbish of things, as a Greek statue is covered with the careless debris of ages.” But Hawthorne reminded readers that “as the art of the sculptor is 324 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 324324 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5512:58:55 PMPM vindicated when the debris has been removed,” so will the virtues of our ancestors “declare themselves” to historians, “when in the maturity of our growth we have assimilated what is good in our accretions and disencumbered ourselves of what is vain.” In the meantime, he noted, we must control our materialistic excesses, we must “learn the ultimate use and value of the vast accumulation of things which we are gathering together,” or end up “like slaves, imagining ourselves masters of the world when we are its helpless drudges and lackeys. We must develop a soul to animate withal this huge corporeal mass of impedimenta, of conveniences, luxuries, curiosities, redundancies.” Hawthorne saw it as his task to encourage readers to “lift it and rationalize it out of its present abject and selfi sh sprawl, and cause it to occupy its proper offi ce and place in our human economy.” Noting that “[w]e cannot solve from below the problems which now perplex us,” Hawthorne warned that “we must rise to a height where they become indifferent to us, and then we shall look down upon them and understand them.”158 Encouraging as such complex, transcendental thinking was, it did not offset the simple, undeniable logic of Childe Hassam’s refl ection that for most artists of the period the “tangible attractions of the physical world at hand furnish[ed] more inspirations than the spiritual glories of kingdom come.”159 In important ways, these ironies were systemic to the genre of popular history and revealed a central paradox at the heart of publishing efforts in the popular book market. The failure of Hawthorne’s history ultimately underscored an ambiguity at the heart of popular culture, namely, that the mechanisms constructed for the pursuit of a cause might in the structure of their own design invalidate the cause itself. In the case of popular history, the attainment of popularity required so many concessions to the kinds of isms (commercial- and capital-) that Hawthorne detested, that he could not embrace fi nally the market forces necessary to secure an audience for his antimaterialist rhetoric. Hawthorne’s United States revealed him to be an intellectual elitist among popularizers, and his condition mirrored that of the genre generally. Once viewed by Frost and others as a form of democratic protection against the usurping powers of intellectual aristocracies, the publication of popular histories had now become part of a vast industry of mass-produced popular books which was itself controlling and potentially aristocratic. As Lawrence Levine has remarked, certain cultural reformulations occurred at the turn of the century which subjected popular forms to “many of the same forces of consolidation and centralization that molded other businesses.” The mass production of popular histories, which had once been hailed as a means for bringing history “within the reach of all classes of society,” had now become a medium “for cultural dilution.” As Levine noted, “a process that rendered an expressive form relatively simple, defi nitely accessible to large numbers of untrained amateurs, Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 325

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 325325 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM and almost infi nitely reproducible,” came to be viewed as “a radical departure from an ethos that judged art and culture to be the sacred, unique products of the rare individual spirit.” Coopted by powerful, leveling forces within the publishing industry, popular historians such as Hawthorne either forsook their reputations as agents of the unconventional or went unread.160 The failure of Hawthorne’s United States did not rest solely with the impersonal forces of market economies, however. Blame rested at least as much with the author himself, since Hawthorne’s desire to popularize his ideas had encouraged him to grasp indecently for the very popular forms that betrayed him. The writing of popular history did little, as it turned out, to relieve his anxieties and insecurities about the value of his life. Increasingly after the publication of the Hawthorne’s United States, in fact, he became disillusioned completely with the “business” of writing. Having tried his hand at short stories, novels, journalism, and now popular history, Hawthorne discovered that the process of literary production was unsatisfying in most regards. “I am often asked whether I enjoy writing, and I generally reply that I do not,” he noted, adding that the “mechanical act of putting words on paper is often disagreeable, not only because hand and eye get weary, but because the act is mechanical, and indispensable.”161 Hawthorne’s experiences with the Collier volumes painfully confi rmed for him the validity of his father’s warnings about a literary career. “I cannot conscientiously say that I have found the literary profession—in and for itself—entirely agreeable,” he noted in this moment of despair, adding: “Al- most everything I have written has been written from necessity; and there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to see forgotten.”162 In fact, his struggle to convey the power of the spiritual “ideals” to indifferent, materialist-minded audiences caused him to abandon hope of popularity in his own day and to long for a certain deferred gratifi cation. As he noted to a poet friend: “This is not a place, nor a time, for literary success. The energy and imagination of our country is occupied in other directions—in commerce, in the occupations by which a mighty Continent is developed. The fl ower of literature must wait for appreciation until the turmoil is over. You and such as you can fi nd little hearing now: still less can I; but if we give birth to any pure and good thing, I am confi dent it will not be lost.”163 The ironic failures of Hawthorne’s United States also suggest the degree to which Julian Hawthorne and the genre of popular history had come full circle by the turn of the century. Having been born in the 1840s, in the shadow of some of the most eminent writers and artists ever gathered in one nation, and enamored at a very young age with illuminated manuscripts and illustrated books, Hawthorne proved a willing disciple of the romantic idealism of the earliest popular historians such as Irving and Bryant. As he aged and became 326 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 326326 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM a writer of fi ction in his own right, he vascillated, like Ridpath, Eggleston, and Ellis, between a lingering attachment to the sentimental and a new interest in scientifi c realism. At times he embraced the photographic verisimilitude of his age, although, by the twentieth century, he had reverted back to an unrepentant idealism characterized by a personalized brand of spiritual and philosophical history. In making such a choice, Julian Hawthorne doomed himself to relative obscurity (as obscure as a Hawthorne could be, that is), since he was out of step with the prevailing trends in historical writing which continued to emphasize scholarly detachment and objectivity. In the many personal reminiscences he shared over the remaining years of his life, Hawthorne often spoke of feeling out of place in his world, of having a greater affi nity for the departed spirits of his father’s generation than for the pervasive materialists of his own. Yet he also recognized the undeniable advantage of a family name for one so covetous of popularity, and he cultivated to some extent a reputation as a throwback to an earlier age. By his own admission he had “lived long enough to understand” the value of his boyhood memories for the “succeeding era, which had been fed up and too spare with the heroic sort of thing.” While “academic historians may fi nd small value in my reminiscences,” he wrote with self-refl ective good humor, “archeologists will grin over the mouldering pages.”164 Being a popular anachronism did not pay bills, however, and, like nearly all of the popular historians described in these pages, Hawthorne struggled the remainder of his life with fi nancial diffi culties. These fi scal problems occasioned an ironic and tragic event that symbolized poignantly the decline of popular history as a genre. In desperate need of money, in 1908, Hawthorne agreed to become the nominal director of “Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Limited,” a startup mining company with claims to nearly six thousand acres of land in Ontario, Canada.165 In agreeing to lend his name to the enterprise and to recruit potential stockholders, Hawthorne imagined he had achieved some circularity in his life. “For my own part, in going into mining, I revert to the profession for which I was educated,” he wrote with reference to his early efforts in engineering. “While awaiting a job, I took up literature to fi ll the interval. That interval, which lasted near forty years, is now over, and I am going to make money,” he quipped. “One of the best ways of making money without getting it away from other people is to dig it out of the ground.”166 In letters of solicitation sent to friends and acquaintances, Hawthorne noted that Nature had “put millions in gold and silver under foot. Right along under the pine-needles, miles in length, eight inches wide and four hundred feet deep, you would fi nd, among other things, a vein of pure silver like the handle of a spoon;—that is one of the local exhibits. The gold you will not so readily see off-hand; but it is very much there.”167 He had not himself inspected the site, Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 327

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 327327 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM Promotional brochure for the fraudulent mining company with which Julian Hawthorne was associated.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 328328 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM Hawthorne informed his correspondents, but he felt confi dent that those who had recruited him were on the level, and that a small investment at the beginning of the enterprise would reap large benefi ts shortly for everyone involved. Had Hawthorne remained true to the principles he had outlined in the Hawthorne’s United States, he might have avoided the dangers of the mining scheme. In his popular history he had roundly condemned the settlers of Jamestown for seeking after gold and precious metals rather than embracing the spirit of the ideal in the Virginia landscape; he had questioned the motives and impugned the characters of the ’49ers who streaked across the continent in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes; and he had rejected the pervasive materialism of his own day, condemning those who would use literature for the promotion of fi nancial schemes. There were indications that he understood the compromises entailed by the monetary scheme and the potential risks to his reputation and principles should it fail. In August 1908, for instance, Haw- thorne wrote Edith Garrigues, an artist whom he would marry after the death of his fi rst wife, warning her against investing in the project and advising her to keep to her studio and “strive after the Ideal.” He explained to her that his involvement in the mines was based on his repeated failure in his own pursuits of the spirit. “I myself, though a director [of the company] only, have abandoned Literature, which had always treated me in a way to stimulate to the highest pitch my craving for the Ideal” but had also “disassembled her love” and “kicked me down stairs repeatedly.” Urging Garrigues not to defi le herself by giving money to his mining project, he added: “In short, my dear and endangered friend, friends of Mammon are never friends of one another, and are always in peril of being Touched for Fives. . . . The Mine is all very well, but you know the proverb counsels us to let well alone; and it is better to let it remain mine than make it yours.” And then, having thus absolved himself of responsibility for his future wife’s actions, Hawthorne added disingenuously: “I hope what I have said may infl uence you; but if not, a check to the above address will be appreciated. No subscriptions are received for less than Three Hundred Dollars.”168 As Hawthorne anticipated, problems with the mine did develop. The alleged rich deposits proved chimeras, and disgruntled investors cried foul when no dividends from their capital appeared in the fi rst two years of operation. Complaints rolled in to the attorney general’s offi ce, and by 1911, Hawthorne was on trial for using the U.S. mails to defraud investors. After a hearing that lasted several months, he was found guilty of fraud as one of the principal architects of the mining scheme and was sentenced to one year in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.169 The prediction of his mother that Julian’s “absence and unobservance of worldly considerations will probably

Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 329

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 329329 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM not advance him in the dusty arena of life,” seemed sadly fulfi lled by this incarceration. Efforts were made to secure his release. His sister Rose, now Mother Alphonsa, a nun, visited President Woodrow Wilson to seek a pardon, although Wilson ignored the request, possibly because of its political explosiveness.170 The public was also largely unreceptive to the convicted fel- on’s claims of innocence.171 “Julian Hawthorne has exemplifi ed that no man is proof against the lure of quick wealth,” noted one editorial writer, who added that most Americans had already forgotten him. The popular historian had become “a Jovian character, remote and unapproachable, and somewhat shabby in the genteel tradition,” wrote the same patronizing critic. There was “a sadness at the back of his eyes” and “little was left of the Harvard oar and blood. Yet, he remained a noble ruin.”172 For an idealist such as Julian Haw- thorne, anxious to cultivate a public and popular identity, no sadder description might be imagined. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concern that “the hard intercourse of the world, and the many knocks and bruises” his son would receive would “cause a morbid crust of callousness to grow over his heart” also came to fruition. Indeed, Julian Hawthorne spent a year in prison and emerged with “less sympathy and love for his fellow-beings than those who began life with a much smaller portion.” He soured completely to the American system of jurisprudence and to the many democratic ideals he had trumpeted so loudly in his popular histories. In a refl ective book written only a few months after his release, The Sub- terranean Brotherhood (1914), he described the horrifying conditions of his Atlanta prison life in a manner befi tting one of his father’s novels.173 He called his jail cell “a living hell” and condemned the practice rampant throughout the penal system of “starving men in the name of economy.”174 Hawthorne never fully recovered his faith in the government whose judicial institutions he had once viewed as compatible with the march of destiny and the advance of progress.175 Declaring the American body politic marked by “all manner of goiters, carbuncles, and cancers, leprosies, and smallpox pustules,” Haw- thorne now renounced democratic capitalism in favor of socialism. That affi liation placed him beyond the limits of political tolerance for the majority of his former readers and rendered his earlier rejection of historical materialism meaningless.176 In a very real sense, he ceased to be popular with the only constituency that had really mattered to him, the people. Now he was content, as he put it toward the end of his life, to please himself. At an eighty-fi fth birthday celebration in 1931 some “veteran literateur’s well-wishers” characterized him as “a distinguished and noteworthy link between the literary charms and graces of the nineteenth century and the more turgid literary present.”177 Oth- ers were less sure of his legacy, however. “No one remembers the novels of

330 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 330330 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM Julian Hawthorne nowadays,” wrote a less sentimental eulogizer on the occasion of his death of congestive heart failure three years later.178 The same could be said of his nonﬁ ction works, whose sad fate in the literary marketplace over the following few decades seemed to conﬁ rm just how unpopular certain types of popular history had become.

Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 331

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 331331 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM It may be that another ﬁ fty years will see the end of an era in historiography, the ﬁ nal extinction of a noble dream, and history, save as an instrument of entertainment, or a social control will not be permitted to exist. In that case, it will be time for the American Historical Association to disband, for the intellectual assumptions on which it is founded will have been taken away from beneath it. —Theodore Clark Smith, 1935 ......

Conclusion The Unpopularity of Popular History

Julian Hawthorne’s United States was the last of the multivolume popular histories by poets- and novelists-turned-historians that had an impact on the literary marketplace. With the possible exception of Carl Sandburg, no other prominent literary fi gure of the twentieth century attempted to write popular history as I have defi ned it in this book, and Sandburg published not comprehensive history but biography.1 Histories with titles like “Steinbeck’s Popular History of America” or “Hemingway’s History of the American Peo- ple” never materialized in the twentieth century.2 Occasionally, nonacademics in the next generation made the successful crossover to popular history, for instance, James Truslow Adams, Allan Nevins, Van Wyck Brooks, and Bernard De Voto, but they were journalists not poets and novelists, and they were more acceptable to publishers by virtue of their presumed journalistic integrity and their commitment to at least minimal standards of objectivity and “truth.” And, even in these cases, such journalist “popularizers” were often scorned by scholars who accused them of writing “pseudo-history” based on innuendo and inference.3 In a review article elucidating the shortcomings of popular historians with respect to the Puritans, the Harvard professor of history Samuel Eliot Morison accused Van Wyck Brooks, author of The Flower- ing of New England (1936), of working on the “ragged edge of truth” because of his tendency to interpolate fi ctional scenes into the narrative and because of his failure to include an apparatus criticus.4 “Now Van Wyck, don’t you see the reason reviewers say things that irritate you?” Morison implored. “You state facts which to this or that reader sound incredible, and lay your breech bare to their kicks because you don’t protect it with quotes and footnotes.”5 Novelists and poets were even more vulnerable to such metaphoric kicks, he implied, since they wrote history “disguised as something else under a title

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 332332 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM such as ‘The Flowering of Florida’ ” (an obvious dig at Brooks). Professors of history who were suspicious of “fi ne writing” endeavored to protect the innocence of their students “from the seductive charm of Washington Irving or the masculine glamour of Macaulay,” Morison added, and this negative campaign did much to discredit the literary excesses of the genre and to explain why the names of popular literary artists disappeared from those few bibliographic sources treating popular history after the First World War.6 . What had happened to a once proud genre? Why were poets and fi ction writers no longer courted by publishers for history projects? Why had popular history as practiced by converted novelists and poets become so unpopular? Part of the answer to these questions lies in the success of the persistent efforts by professional historians to discredit the comprehensive works of writers such as Irving, Lippard, Frost, Bryant, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and Julian Hawthorne. As the defi nition of what constituted history changed toward the end of the nineteenth century, idealistic systems gave way to a cult of objectivity that demanded adherence to uncompromising standards of truth. Even realist novelists with a commitment to verisimilitude, such as Edward Eggleston, could not approximate the kind of critical distance and self-elimination that professional historians required. As C. Vann Woodward has remarked, “American historians of the academic sort have tended to put distance between themselves and literary folk,” and “the chill of scientifi c exclusiveness has increased and the dissociation has widened” even to this day. Some of these professional scholars were “uncomfortable with the very expression ‘historical literature,’ or the admission that they share with literary craftsmen the use of narrative, the employment of metaphor, or any serious concern with the quality of their prose.”7 For them, the imaginative capacities of the fi ctional or poetic narrator were at odds with the “truth-seeking” responsibilities of the historian.8 They valued the kind of historian who would “cross the ocean to verify a comma,” and ridiculed those who would sacrifi ce assiduity of research for literary effect.9 The ideal of these professionals was an objective narrative style that corresponded exactly with the inherent structures of the past events they intended to describe. By this theory of correspondence, historical writing was assumed to be transparent to the reality it analyzed, constituting a perfect transcription of the past in its most complete form. In fact, many of the most hardline scholars embraced “a very old-fashioned idealization of the full and complete archival record as a kind of holy grail,” Patrick Finney has noted, “incarnating the truth of the past if only it can be accessed in its entirety.”10 Not all scholars shared this extreme positivist view, of course, but most practicing historians agreed that by World War I, America had suffered long

The Unpopularity of Popular History { 333

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 333333 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5612:58:56 PMPM enough from what Kerwin Lee Klein has referred to as “narrative traditions saturated with emotion and poesy,” and they sought to replace those systems “with rational analysis.”11 In journals on the philosophy of history, a select group of renegade scholars admitted that a true theory of correspondence between events and descriptions is impossible to achieve and that all narratives, histories included, have an unavoidable mimetic quality to them. In separating the process of telling from the thing described, these speculative professionals acknowledged that there is an ideological component to any historical discourse.12 If no wholly objective account can ever be written of a past event, Woodward recognized, then all history might be characterized either as an effort to “improve, sanitize, gentrify, idealize, or sanctify the past,” on the one hand, or “to discredit, defame, denigrate, or even to blot out portions of it” on the other. Sometimes there are “positive motives behind manipulations of the past,” he noted, including “desires to enhance lineage, pedigree, national pride, or status by means of ennobling the past.”13 Accepting these contrived elements of historical writing did not mean, however, that professional scholars were willing to abandon all the “epistemic pretensions” of their craft.14 As a means of closing the inevitable gap between narrative and knowledge, these professionals undertook “a series of linguistic purges” in an effort “to cast out ‘soft’ poetic and rhetorical forms,” hoping to liberate history from the most extreme types of “enslavement by metaphor and rhetoric.”15 Popular historians such as those described in this book were victims of these purges. The attacks of professional scholars alone, however, did not account for the decline of popular history. Scholars rarely have much infl uence on public tastes, and, in their purging activities, members of the American Historical As- sociation stood a greater chance of being ostracized themselves by the reading public than they did of convincing readers to banish popularizers. Even if we grant that the campaign of professionals was at least partially successful in undermining the public’s faith in the credibility of popular history, we should not assume that American readers embraced scholarly monographs as the logical alternative for the fashioning of historical sensibilities or that all forms of popular culture treating history vanished. Quite the contrary. Historical fi c- tion such as Gone with the Wind, for instance, remained wildly popular among readers in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. The death of popular history as a formal category did not mean the loss of popularizing efforts, therefore, just the reconfi guring of historical preferences and priorities. Edwin Markham, the poet, recognized this point when he acknowledged that readers preferred fi ction to almost any other type of historical narrative. He argued that it was a fair question to ask whether, “with all their distortions of fact, the average reader does not obtain a truer and more lifelike view of a given period from the 334 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 334334 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM historical novel than from the usual text-book.”16 Historians chose to “confi ne their services very largely to the work of producing authentic accounts of segments of the past based on evidence that passes rigorous tests for reliability,” he claimed, and these intellectual parameters made it impossible for them to compete with historical novels in the public imagination.17 Markham’s commentary on historical fi ction was highly relevant to the debate over popular history and its forms because he was involved in the last real effort by an American publisher to enlist a well-known literary fi gure in the production of a popular history of the United States, and its failure symbolized something important about the bankruptcy of the genre. This fi nal project evolved slowly through a series of stages that defi ned the downward arc of popular historical studies in America. It began with John R. Musick of Kirksville, Missouri, a prolifi c nineteenth-century writer who started his career as a lawyer but eventually turned to journalism, poetry, short stories, and historical novels to sustain himself.18 In the early 1890s, he contracted with Funk and Wagnalls to produce a twelve-volume series of novels (the Columbian Historical Novels) that told the history of the United States “from the time of Columbus to the present” in a fi ctional format.19 Musick died in 1901, but the property rights to his novels were transferred to William Wise, a New York publisher who reissued the Columbian series (along with a previously unpublished thirteenth volume) as The Real America in Romance (1909–10).20 Wise convinced Edwin Markham to edit and rewrite the series, capitalizing in the process on some of the reputation the bard had achieved from his internationally acclaimed “The Man with the Hoe” (1899). Inspired by the Millet painting of the same title, the poem earned Markham “fame with the masses” by drawing attention to the miserable conditions under which subsistence farmers—“bowed by the weight of centuries”—labored.21 This association with the masses revealed important points of convergence between Markham and some of the popularizers who proceeded him, including the poetic sensibilities of Bryant, the social consciousness of Ridpath, and the antimaterialism of Julian Hawthorne.22 In the words of Arena founder B. O. Flower, Markham was “democracy’s greatest poet” and the most obvious legatee of the mass-minded, popularizing tradition initiated a half century earlier by John Frost and others.23 Like his predecessors in the fi eld of popular history, Markham emphasized the importance of narrative to his historical vision. In a prospectus to The Real America in Romance titled “The Plan and Scope,” Markham reminded would-be readers of the series that the fi rst histories were oral narratives passed down from generation to generation by storytellers representing “truth clad in a living personality.” Because no “teller of tales” in the preliterate world could gain or hold an audience without considerable “dramatic appeal,” Markham The Unpopularity of Popular History { 335

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 335335 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM argued, ancient practitioners of history understood that “romance” was the most “natural and easy method of acquiring lasting impressions.” Modern academic historians had forgotten this truism, however. “It is the common experience of students that knowledge acquired from the study of a plain narrative history is, at best, stored in the mind in a chaotic state, with no welding together of its parts either in regard to place or time,” Markham wrote. “This series has been prepared with the expectation that even the advanced student, by reading these romances, will be able to obtain defi nite, lasting, logical, and complete impressions, to serve as a solid foundation for information obtained from other sources.” The logic was simple and derivative of Eggleston among others. In essence, Markham believed that romantic conventions would be the means to a realistic end. “Romance and history march hand in hand; and so well are they blended that, while we are reading for mere recreation, we acquire a broad and comprehensive knowledge, not only of the discovery and colonization of America, but also of our national development,” he wrote in his prospectus. “The result is romance and authentic history blended to their mutual advantage.” Markham’s narrative strategy was to intersperse verifi able historical events and fi gures with fi ctional supporting characters and settings as a way of intensifying the realism of a romantic scene. “The reader loses himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting are made on the heart as well as on the intellect,” he noted. “You do not merely read about Columbus,” he boasted of one representative instance in which he placed a fi ctional protagonist on board the Santa Maria with Columbus; “you endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice with him in his achievements.”24 Markham organized his narrative history into thirteen volumes, each corresponding with the rise of a new generation of American discoverers, colonists, and citizens. In periodizing the past generationally rather than by traditional epochs, Markham appealed to the tendency of popular readers to absorb historical knowledge according to the rhythms of their own private lives. “The sole and constant aim has been to make the reader live through the thirteen generations of American development, in order that his own life may become coextensive with the life of the nation,” he wrote. This technique also allowed Markham to chart change over time as a personal conceit, humanizing the connections between past and present in a manner reminiscent of Edward Ellis. A sense of historical continuity is maintained in The Real America in Romance by means of a series of contrived plot devices involving relatives and descendants of a single family scattered throughout the Americas. The fi rst volume, for instance, features Hernando Estevan, a fi ctional traveling companion of Columbus’s who is the progenitor of the numerous heroes and heroines in 336 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 336336 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM the succeeding volumes. In volume four, two of Hernando’s grandchildren from St. Augustine, Florida, are kidnapped by Sir Francis Drake and taken to England, “where the family name is duly anglicized into Stevens.” One of these grandchildren ends up in John Smith’s Jamestown, while the other makes his way to William Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation. The paths of the descendants of these northern and southern branches of the Stevens family crisscross throughout subsequent eras of American history (most dramatically during the Civil War), until the thirteenth volume on the Spanish-American War, when two direct descendants of Hernando Estevan (“one with Dewey at Manila, the other with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba”) are introduced to each other, appropriately enough in the place where the family fi rst took root thirteen generations before—in the Caribbean.25 There is no denying that the organizational strategy of tracing generational relations and legacies—a technique revived seventy years later in John Jakes’s popular bicentennial series, The Kent Family Chronicles—made for interesting reading.26 There was also no doubt, however, that in the eyes of many scholars at the time, Markham’s series was not history but something else. As might have been expected, professional historical journals ignored completely The Real America in Romance. Revealingly, however, the volumes garnered virtually no attention from readers of popular literature outside the academy either. If we distinguish, as Jonathan Nield did, between historical fi ction (in which historical settings are “truthful” as to background and setting but in which fi ctional characters are introduced to carry the plot) and fi ctional history (in which a real life character such as Napoleon is presented in contrived circumstances), then Markham’s volumes could have been eligible for review in either category; instead, they were ignored in both.27 Among the very few readers who did trouble themselves to comment on the series, only those who appreciated the poet’s democratizing efforts on behalf of popular readers acknowledged any historical value in the works at all.28 As one supportive writer put it, volumes such as The Real America in Romance revealed that “Edwin Markham is people.”29 To others, however, the duplicitous editorial choices made in the series regarding the relationship of fact to fi ction suggested that Markham was many people, too many, in fact, to be credible as a historian. Paul Fatout described Markham as “a fusion of mortal ambiguities: sage and charlatan, sincere believer in human regeneration and incorrigible poseur, occasional truth-teller and whilom liar, momentarily a realist between fl ights from reality, humdrum poetaster and once-in-a-while poet. In short, a bundle of contradictions, fascinating and ridiculous, like humanity in general.”30 That description might also have applied to the genre of popular history at the turn of the century, since most popularizers were dismissed by critics as similarly

The Unpopularity of Popular History { 337

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 337337 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM contradictory (more ridiculous than fascinating) in their approaches to and uses of history. What changed with respect to the reputation of works by popular historians was not interest in things historical, then, but the categories by which popular ideas about the past were deﬁ ned and processed. David Glassberg has argued that historians of the professionalization of history have misunderstood the relevance of these subtle shifts, assuming that the restrictive specialization of the professional mission and the erosion of popular history as a literary form signaled a diminution in the historical-mindedness of the American public. Rather than “attacking the public for their ignorance of history or the professors for being out of touch,” he notes, we should recognize that popular interest in the past remained strong in this period even as some of its most established forms changed to make way for new versions of the past. To understand the persistence of interest in history in light of these changes we must reconceive how we “examine the place of the past in the wider culture.” One way to do this is to focus on the history of the production of popular works as a way of getting at a more expansive deﬁ nition of history. The meaning of a popular history, I agree with Glassberg, “is not intrinsic, determined solely by the intention of its creator, but changes as we actively reinterpret what we see and hear by placing it in alternative contexts derived from our diverse social backgrounds.” By studying not only the backgrounds and authorial intentions of writers such as Irving, Lippard, Frost, Bryant, Gay, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and Hawthorne but also the translation of their ideas into print by publishers, editors, and production staffs, I have tried to highlight “the interrelationships between different versions of the past in the public arena.”31 The need for popularizers to appeal to larger and larger audiences makes the marketplace an important instrument for measuring changing popular expectations about the past, and I have maintained that we can learn as much from the losers in this competition for control of the public imagination as we can from the winners. In this light, the demise of popular history as a going literary concern dominated by novelists and poets should not obscure the fact that some of its most salient features lived on long after the formal genre disappeared. Certainly appreciation for the role of narration has persisted, even among those most guarded about its uses. Recognition of the power and durability of historical novels as a popular genre among readers, for instance, encouraged some professionals to reevaluate the role of storytelling elements in scholarly historical writing and contributed to a “revival of narrative” in the middle of the twentieth century. Narrative, it would seem, had earned an undeserved reputation as an impediment to historical understanding. Those philosophers of history who had come to accept (even embrace) the outlook 338 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 338338 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM that all historical narratives are “verbal fi ctions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in sciences” gained new adherents within the profession.32 The debate over the role of texts and contexts among literary structuralists also revived interest in narrative strategies. Reinhold Niebuhr argued in The Irony of American History (1946), for instance, that the historical patterns and confi gurations discerned by historians to be “objectively” true in a historical account are instead “imposed upon the vast stuff of history by [the] imagination.” Urging scholars to recognize that all history is a subjective production—something created rather than found—Niebuhr likened history to “the confusion of spots on the cards used by psychiatrists in a Rorschach test.” The patient “is asked to report what he sees in these spots; and he may claim to fi nd the outlines of an elephant, butterfl y or frog,” he wrote. “The psychiatrist draws conclusions from these judgments about the state of the patient’s imagination rather than about the actual confi guration of spots on the card.”33 Postmodernists elaborated on this point by arguing that historical narratives do not derive from historical events but from forms that predate those episodes, that is, “pre-existing emplotment strategies imposed on the past by the historian.”34 For some traditional professional scholars, this kind of revivalist thinking about narrative portended an epistemological crisis for the discipline and presented a supreme challenge to the “noble” goal of achieving objectivity. If users of narrative conventions in history were not constrained by standards of objectivity in regard to the events they described, and if the archetypal literary forms they used always predated events, then how could historians ever hope to escape the determinism of the a priori and analytic, on the one hand, or the a posteriori and synthetic, on the other? The most pessimistic of such postmodern historians saw no way to extricate themselves from this Gordian knot of confusion and predicted an “end of history” as a discipline.35 For others, however, the return of narrative was liberating because it reduced the pressures of absolutes within the discipline (that is, of having to defi ne and execute the one and only narrative strategy appropriate to describing a particular historical event) and reaffi rmed the original mission of the profession to understand the historicity of the past. Certainly the revival gave incentive to scholars to look back at historical narratives afresh and to appreciate them for what they were, not deviations from some preemptory master narrative but competing dialogues grounded in the particulars of the times in which they were written. The effect of this thinking of late has been to resuscitate interest in popular as well as scholarly narrative forms and to encourage reconsiderations of the linguistic and ideological components of history as discourse.36 The Unpopularity of Popular History { 339

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 339339 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM These changes have encouraged some scholars to resist passing absolute value judgments on the accuracy of popular narratives with respect to the historical record—indeed, it prompts them to question the very concept of accuracy in the ﬁ rst place—and to make important distinctions between the discursive form and the semantic content of historical writing. According to Andrew Norman, “historical narratives have wrongly been assumed to be making truth claims, and consequently judged by the wrong standard.” Popu- lar historians sought something other than “referential” legitimacy. “The fact that a true historical account has a plot structure does not imply that the past it articulates has a plot structure, any more than the fact that ‘the sky is blue’ has a grammatical structure implies that the sky has a grammatical structure,” Norman reasons. “The past need not have a narrative structure for a story about it to be true.”37 By this standard, histories written by professional historians in the twentieth century shared more with those of popularizers than their authors were willing to admit. It is important to note, however, that the “revival of narrative” movement with which these trends are associated was not (except in rare cases) synonymous with radical historical relativism or unconditional subjectivism. That is, its proponents did not suggest that all narratives are equally valid in terms of their historical worth, and no one (of whom I am aware) has advocated for the republication of popular works such as those studied here on the grounds that they provide the most acceptable presentations of the past. Popular historians of the late nineteenth century narrativized in distinct ways that compromised their abilities to write durable history: Bry- ant oversentimentalized, while Gay was a slave to scientism; Ridpath thought too grandly, and Eggleston reached too aggressively for a totality of vision; Ellis succumbed too readily to the effects of presentism, while Hawthorne was too consumed by the seduction of materialism. Most narrative revivalists still adhere to some operational principles de- ﬁ ning valid historical writing, therefore, and their disregard for popularizers suggests the persistence of objectivity as an operational principle within the profession. These philosophers of history, however, do point to the potential value of understanding why some narratives achieve popularity at given times while others do not. Studies of the changing fortunes of popular histories in the literary marketplace reveal important things about the cultural preferences of readers unwilling or unable to justify their choices to scholarly arbiters. My own approach to these popular histories is similar to Emily Rosenberg’s toward the multiplicity of narratives emanating from accounts of events at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. “This book attempts not to stabilize some truth about this iconic event but to investigate its instability and to see what can be learned from the terms of contestation,” she has written.38 Similarly, I have not 340 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 340340 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM tried to pass judgment on which of the popular histories studied in this book is more “right” than others. Nor am I prepared to say that professional historians have developed an unimpeachable standard for truth by which to evaluate and presumably to condemn popular history. I have been interested simply in how the production histories of these popular works reveal changing attitudes among those who engaged most actively in their day in the debate over how the past should look and be remembered. Lest we think that this exchange between popularizers and professionals was itself a quaint, isolated historical debate confi ned to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when defi nitions of what constituted history were more fl uid, we should consider that versions of the same debate rage today.39 A case in point is the recent controversy over David McCullough’s Pu- litzer Prize–winning biography, John Adams. The “popular” author of notable works on the Johnstown Flood, the Panama Canal, and the Brooklyn Bridge, McCullough has served as the host/narrator of many public history projects such as Smithsonian World, The American Experience, and Ken Burns’s The Civil War.40 His special claim to fame has been his ability to reach wide audiences through prose as vivid as Bryant’s, “paint[ing] with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breath, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character.”41 Mc- Cullough is not a popular historian in the metahistorical sense of Ridpath, nor does he write with the pretentious presentism of Ellis. McCullough does not identify with the “people” the way Eggelston did, either; only Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has revived that ambition in the late twentieth century.42 McCullough is “popular,” however, insofar as he has been successful in bringing the past to readers in a manner more direct and dramatic than is typical of professional historians. 43 He also takes seriously the idea of history as literary art. “I want readers to gain an appreciation of this singular, colorful, and important man who affected how we all live,” McCullough noted of his treatment of Adams.44 The goal of John Adams and other comparable popular books, one approving student adds, is “to transform history into a narrative and thus wake the dead by bringing select historical characters back to life within the confi nes of a well-told story about America’s past.”45 Despite his considerable gifts as a popular storyteller, McCullough faced a special challenge in waking Adams from the dead, since the second president had a reputation as a stubborn, self-righteous, insufferable curmudgeon.46 In place of this uncharitable characterization, McCullough substituted a “more fully developed, three-dimensional, warm-blooded and compelling” portrait of an “extraordinary and important American” who deserved “to be brought out of the shadows.” Acknowledging that Adams was “vivid, irritable, vain, The Unpopularity of Popular History { 341

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 341341 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5712:58:57 PMPM [and] stubborn to an extreme,” McCullough also insisted that he was “brave, warmhearted, outspoken, humorous, affectionate and quite lovable.”47 Eventu- ally, many readers enthusiastically embraced this portrait of a more endearing Adams, thanking McCullough for the literary fl air with which he rescued this underappreciated founding father from the scrap heap of obscurity. “David McCullough’s John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel,” wrote one reviewer, who added: “It is both a riveting portrait of an abundantly human man and a vivid evocation of his time. . . . This is history on a grand scale.”48 The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was even more effusive, calling McCullough “the citizen chronicler of the American story for our time.” He attributed the success of John Adams to the fact that as an independent scholar, McCullough was free to rethink conventional wisdom regarding the second president and was “not beholden to any of the ideological causes or methodological fads that often take possession of otherwise good historians in bureaucratized academia—and cause them to end up writing more for each other than for a general audience.”49 In these latter remarks Billington anticipated the criticisms of some professional reviewers who used the term “popular” to condemn mythologizing tendencies in McCullough’s work. Indeed, as celebrated as John Adams was in the popular book market, it was attacked by many academic scholars for its fi liopietistic tendencies. In a review for the New Republic titled “America Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History,” the Princeton professor of history Sean Wilentz ridiculed McCullough’s overem- phasis on the essential “goodness of John Adams,” especially the prominence of “his plainspokenness, his political courage, his statesmanly virtue [and] his connubial ardor.” According to Wilentz, Adams was “one of the most suspicious, pugnacious, and at times pig-headed conservatives of the early Ameri- can republic,” whose “pettiness” and “disabling pessimism” justifi ed the rough treatment he has received at the hands of historians. Expressing disdain for the “new golden age of historical popularization” that encouraged fawning portraits of lackluster presidents, Wilentz was especially disturbed by McCullough’s tendency to fi ll his book with “page after page of detailed anecdote,” exaggerating the relative importance of small, even trivial, aspects of Adams’s character while ignoring the president’s more glaring defects. For Wilentz, McCullough’s skewed portrait of Adams resulted from more than mere literary failure; it was the product of a calculated, conservative, political strategy not unlike that employed by nineteenth-century popularizers. Read- ing John Adams made Wilentz long for a time when “[c]ritical analysis was in the saddle,” when “American history was meant to rattle its readers, not to confi rm them in their received myths and platitudes about America.” Writing 342 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 342342 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM in an age when most Americans were afraid to criticize their government or to see failings in their leaders, Wilentz reasoned, McCullough had abandoned the proper restraint and ideological balance necessary for responsible history.50 What accounts for the vitriolic tone of Wilentz’s comments and for his radically different usage of the term popular in evaluating the merits of John Adams? By now the argument should be clear to us, anticipated as it was so completely by debates between popularizers and professionals in the nineteenth century. For one thing, a distrust of McCullough’s basic facts incurred Wilentz’s wrath in ways reminiscent of the frustrations scholars expressed with the works of Bryant or Ellis at the annual meetings of the American His- torical Association in the 1880s and 1890s. An unfortunate misquote of Jef- ferson (later acknowledged with regret by McCullough) raised some initial suspicions among critics.51 From there it was an easy jump to the assertion that McCullough had distorted other aspects of Adams’s career in order to promote a more respectable portrait of the president than facts warranted. Still more insidious was the suggestion that McCullough had twisted the historical record for the sake of profi ts. The same insinuations of commercialism leveled against Lippard and Hawthorne were also raised with increased vigor against this biographer who stood to make a lot of money if he could rehabili- tate Adams as an endearing fi gure about whom readers were anxious to know more. Reminding us that McCullough got his start as an editor for the highly commercialized, “pseudo-historical” magazine American Heritage, Wilentz shares John Higham’s assessment of the publication as having always had “a great appeal, high technical fi nish, and no intellectual challenge at all.”52 By association, Wilentz notes, McCullough’s John Adams also favors shallow anecdote and superfl uous prose over penetrating “or even reliable evaluation of Adams’s ideas and politics.”53 In turn, defenders of McCullough disparage “guild historians” such as Wilentz who fail to appreciate fully the crucial signifi cance of popularizing impulses to the national historical memory.54 Professional historians are too restrictive in their approaches to the past, they aver, sucking the life out of the past by insisting on detached and dehumanizing methodologies. “It is inevitable that such a popular historian should be subjected to a variety of challenges and criticisms by academic historians,” James Billington noted of McCullough’s treatment at the hands of scholars. “A frequent professo- rial complaint is that there is too much storytelling and not enough social and psychological analysis” in such works, Billington acknowledged, in ways reminiscent of the debate over New History, but he added that McCullough’s “accuracy and eye for illustrative detail have been widely recognized—as have the frequent insights embedded in his narratives.”55 James McWilliams agreed, The Unpopularity of Popular History { 343

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 343343 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM arguing that “anyone who writes for a wider market, according to the conventional faculty-club wisdom, is deemed a quaint sellout to the noble cause of ‘serious’ scholarship,” a narrow-minded critique that does a great disservice to popular history. “[F]or better or worse, it just so happens that the great un- washed, Barnes and Noble–going masses would rather curl up with a compelling narrative than even the best written intellectual biography,” McWilliams concluded. “What Wilentz and most academic historians who turn up their noses [at] narrative history completely fail to grasp, is that non-historians who didn’t spend ten years of their life earning a doctorate simply don’t care to read a systematic delineation of the ﬁ ne points of a president’s evolving political ideology. In fact, they don’t care about the vast majority of what historians write.” Wilentz’s “intellectual snobbery,” he argued, “is the academic’s way of howling at the moon.”56 Other supporters of McCullough have added that Wilentz’s criticisms of the political tone of John Adams were themselves politically motivated, generated to support Princeton University’s brand of “liberal debasement.” In a facetious rebuttal to “America Made Easy” titled “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?” conservative columnist Paul Greenberg took direct issue with the “clichéd lib- eralism” employed by Wilentz to attack McCullough’s book. Noting with contempt that the Princeton professor was among those who defended President Bill Clinton in the press during his impeachment hearings, Greenberg ranted against such “ideologues in historians’ clothing” who employed their favorite political doctrines in hypocritical campaigns against the use of political doctrines in history. “Sean Wilentz is unhappy,” Greenberg wrote, because “like every court historian, the professor resents it when people are reading some unauthorized chronicle, and, worse, enjoying it. We’re no longer settling for the kind of ideological concerns that the professor would put at the center of his vague, class-centric history,” he claimed, adding that a “revolution is going on in our reading habits, and Sean Wilentz is pretty darn disgusted about it” because he senses that “[he] and his kind could be dethroned.” Condemning Wilentz as a “bypassed historian” who “hates to see the amateurs take over,” Greenberg noted with tongue in cheek that readers of popular histories such as McCullough’s John Adams must be “dangerous” creatures indeed, since they “are not intimidated by the textbooks so laboriously turned out by the bin pensant with tenure. How impertinent of us,” he concluded sarcastically. “Don’t we realize that some questions are forever closed? Imagine anyone taking John Adams seriously at this late date!”57 Wilentz’s caustic critique of McCullough and Greenberg’s equally acerbic reply suggest how sharply historians are still divided on the deﬁ nition and value of the “popular” in popular history. Disputes over John Adams’s reputation cut

344 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 344344 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM directly to the heart of the historical enterprise itself, throwing into high relief profound philosophical issues related to the proper techniques for preserving memory. The debate over whether Adams was an unlikable ideologue or a compassionate genius, for instance, compels historians to think about what values to privilege over others in reconstructing historical character. Should historians emphasize (as McCullough does) a Dickinsonian treatment of John Adams’s inner world or should critics question (following Wilentz) the validity of literary strategies that depend so heavily on subjective storytelling elements? And the “great divide” that presumably continues to separate the work of popularizers and professionals suggests that there is as yet no mutually agreed upon standard by which one group can claim superiority over others when it comes to questions of historical truth. Indeed, the wide range of responses to works such as John Adams reveals that historians continue to debate the very foundations of “truth” in the fi rst place. In arguing over the merits of McCullough’s depiction of what life was like for John Adams in the eighteenth century, historians, in short, have been pushed (somewhat against their will) back into the shadowy realms of epistemology and ontology, where they have had to face frightening specters in the form of questions such as “What is reality?” and “How do we come to know what we know about reality with reference to the past?” In Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, I have attempted to provide some answers to these questions in the context of a detailed discussion of the relevance of popular history as a genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hope I have made it clear, however, that popularizers and professionals share important traits, and that representative historians of both dispositions continue to infl uence how readers of history absorb its lessons today. While it is true that scholars generally reject those forms of narration and explanation that would seem to violate internal codes of the profession (historians do not knowingly lie, for instance) and while popularizers dismiss those modes of scholarly discourse whose specialized vocabularies obscure meaning, there is nothing per se that prohibits members of either group from employing the literary devices of the other in the telling of their historical tales. Hayden White has suggested that one or more of the tropes of romance, irony, tragedy, and comedy are specifi c to all historical narratives, implying that one can fi nd evidence of common strategies of literary development in the works of amateurs and professionals alike.58 The conventions of literature are essentially neutral and available to authors of all persuasions. The old distinctions between “elite” and “popular,” which derived from a belief in “transcendent or universal principles or values in the evaluation of literature, art and music” and which made it easy to distinguish between “high” and “low” culture, have given way to a postmodern recognition of the value of multiple forms of cultural expression. The Unpopularity of Popular History { 345

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 345345 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM The result is that the designation popular no longer necessarily implies a commitment to a particular kind of less sophisticated narrative strategy any more than the term professional is an absolute guarantee against the use of certain belletristic rhetorical devices.59 The categories have become more fl uid and the debate over the value of narrative subsequently more complex. One might also hope that with increasing complexity comes the benefi t of further philosophical refl ection and, dare we say it, even some partial understandings. Perhaps the last word on this matter should go to Robert Penn Warren, a poet and novelist with a demonstrated interest in the philosophy of history. Author of All the King’s Men, a thinly veiled portrait of Huey Long, Warren told the story of an aggressive southern governor with presidential aspirations from the vantage point of a historian narrator—Jack Burden, who is working on his Ph.D. in history but who gives up graduate school when he recognizes that he comprehends the facts of the past but not their meanings. Eschewing history and its annoying complexities, Jack places faith only in what he calls the Great Twitch, that is, the present moment, which serves as an escape mechanism from the implications of his past. History makes sense only after much distanced refl ection, Jack realizes, and he is unwilling to take on the “burden” of that refl ection.60 For Warren, only poets were capable truly of that refl ective gift, and even they were forced to operate within certain rules. “I am trying to write a poem, not a history,” he noted in his foreword to Brothers to Dragons, but “a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to be the nature of the human heart.” Warren observed that, in the end, historical sense and poetic sense were not mutually exclusive; rather, he argued, “if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.’ ”61 Jack Burden was no bard, however, and, because he did not have a poet’s sense of the inherent narrativity of the past, he was not an adequate historian either. The “burden of the past” for those like Burden without a poetic soul, Warren implied, was to remain forever constrained by its facts without access to its liberating feelings. And how would Huey Long, the teenaged book peddler turned populist politician, have reacted to Warren’s thoughts about the poetic and historical underpinnings of the popular book market had his death not been the occasion for Warren’s refl ections in the fi rst place? The answer may well be found in the ad campaigns for the popular histories he sold back in the summer of 1908, which shaped so graphically the “big myths” by which he and many others lived their lives. Ridpath’s Popular History of the World, for instance, was advertised by the Ridpath Historical Society of Cincinnati as the work of “America’s greatest historian.” Combining the “absorbing interest” of the 346 } Conclusion

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 346346 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM poet with the “supreme reliability” of the historian, Ridpath’s volumes pictured “the great historical events as though they were happening before your eyes,” according to promoters. If so, then the illustration that appeared just above these pronouncements in the ad, titled “Christian Martyrs Given To the Lions,” made for an especially gruesome perspective on the poetic and historical past. The highly sensationalized image represented the “inevitable doom of the Empire” by depicting the “blood of the Martyrs” and the furor of the “87,000 people who had assembled in the Coliseum at Rome to witness the Christians given to the lions.” Even the unabashed Huey Long would have found this marketing strategy excessive, perhaps, but that would not have prevented him from profi ting fi nancially and later politically from its startling and powerful message. Long’s willingness to capitalize commercially on works featuring maudlin illustrations such “Christian Martyrs,” suggested that he believed that history was a commodity that could and should be bought and sold for profi t. Popular history as a genre had experienced its heyday in the nineteenth century, when distinctions between history and fi ction (and their hybrids historical fi ction and fi ctional history) were less rigidly defi ned and when sentimental illustrations were more acceptable as serviceable representations of visual reality. Well into the twentieth century, however, these tendencies persisted and continued to fuel a popular book market. Despite the best regu- latory efforts of cynical scholars, popular history still had an appeal to certain types of audiences in Long’s Winn’s Parish, Louisiana, and beyond. If nothing else, the proliferation of sensational works of popular historical literature that appeared after the assassination of Huey Long—including All the King’s Men itself—proved that the genre was as resilient as it was controversial.

The Unpopularity of Popular History { 347

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 347347 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 348348 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM Notes

Introduction: “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes” 1. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Vintage, 1969), 21, 32, 33–34, 47. 2. William E. Leuchtenburg, “FDR and the Kingfi sh,” American Heritage (Oct/ Nov 1985): 59–60. 3. Williams, Huey Long, 34, 36–37, 48. 4. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 50. 5. Huey Long, “Sharing Our Wealth,” Senate Record, Session 1 of the 74th Con- gress, 410–12. 6. Benson John Lossing, Biographical Sketches of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1854), iv. For more on Lossing’s career as a popularizer, see Harold Mahan, Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the United States, 1830–1890 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 20. 7. William H. Prescott, Notebook IV, 80–81; Notebook V, 45, Prescott Papers, Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, cited in David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1959), 10. See also Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 423–46. 8. Paul C. Gutjahr, “Preface,” in Popular American Literature of the 19th Century, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv–xvi. 9. George Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Pur- pose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 197–98. 10. To avoid some of the confusion regarding the defi nition of popular history, I have employed the term “popular” in this book in a manner consistent with its usage in the late nineteenth century. That is, I have defi ned “popular” as it was understood and aspired to by those nineteenth-century historians, publishers, and bibliographers who used the designation in their works. If a publication identifi ed itself in its title, description, or advertisements as “popular” or “for the people,” then I have taken it at its word and have included it in the category of popular history. This strategy substitutes a supply-side for a demand-side model of deno- tation. In this sense, the genre as I determine it is self-selecting and grounded in the nomenclature of its time. By defi ning the genre of popular history according to the designations imposed on it by its practitioners, we can include under its

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 349349 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM rubric works of history that did not fare well in the literary marketplace but that aspired to wide public appeal nonetheless. I am aware that such a classifi cation system permits the inclusion of volumes that might misrepresent themselves to the public, either willfully (as in the case of false advertising) or unintentionally (as when publishers misjudge their audiences). Just because a book declares itself “popular,” in other words, does not make it so. But what is important to me is the culture of production surrounding these mass-circulating histories and the complex philosophical questions emanating from the intricate processes of negotiation among the publishers, writers, and agents who created and marketed them. In each case I have asked: What were the authors of these works intending? What power struggles led to the privileging of some popular texts over others? And who were the winners and losers in this process? 11. Francois Guizot, A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, trans. Rob- ert Black (Boston: D. Estes and C. E. Lauriat [187?]). For examples of popular histories in other nations, see Charles Knight, The Popular History of England: An Illustrated History of Society and Government from the Earliest Period to Our Own Time (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856). 12. Sydney G. Fisher, “The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 51 (1912): 64–65. James Gilreath, “Mason Weems, Mathew Carey, and the Southern Booktrade, 1794–1820,” Publishing History 10 (1981): 27–49. 13. [Joel Dorman Steele and Esther B. Steele], Barnes’ Popular History of the United States of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1875), 5–6. 14. Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860, vii. See also David D. Van Tas- sel, “Teaching Patriotism: Emphasis on Popular History, 1815–50,” in Record- ing America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 43. 15. Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1824), 1:iii, cited in Callcott, History in the United States, 26. 16. For an extensive treatment of the pictorial element in popular histories, see Greg- ory M. Pfi tzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagi- nation, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 17. Harold Kellock, Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree (facsimile reprint of the 1928 edition; Ann Arbor: Gryphon Books, 1971), 134, cited in Handbook of American Popular Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 199–200. 18. For more on these patrician historians, see Levin, History as Romantic Art. 19. “Popular history” as defi ned in terms of sales of texts raises some issues, however. For instance, it is often diffi cult to determine just how many copies of a book have been sold, since good records were not kept by many publishing houses in the nine- 350 } Notes to Pages 5–7

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 350350 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5812:58:58 PMPM teenth century, and publishers were sometimes reluctant to disclose such fi gures even when they did maintain adequate fi les. In addition, one might well ask how many copies of a book must be sold before it can be designated as “popular.” Is a book that sold 30,000 copies in 1876 “popular” whereas one that sold 20,000 is not? And what audience? Mary Howitt’s popular history circulated widely in Eu- rope (Howitt was British), but not in America, where the distraction of the Civil War and concerns about British sympathies for the South limited sales dramatically. 20. Mary Botham Howitt, A Popular History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860); Hamilton W. Mabie, Popular History of the United States (Philadelphia: Fidelity Publishing, 1897). 21. Jack Carter Thompson, “Images for Americans in Popular Survey Histories, 1820–1912,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1976); see esp. Appendix C, “An Ordinal Ranking of Authors According to the Number of Times Publishers Is- sued Their Books,” 450–72. 22. On the “commodifi cation of literary culture,” see Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 19, 132–33. 23. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3. 24. See Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, Imagined Histories: American Histo- rians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 25. Michael Winship, “Foreword,” in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), vii. 26. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 19. There is a useful discussion of these Western storytelling elements in popular narratives in Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Sto- ries That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New York: New Press, 2004), 266–69. 27. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46. 28. Sir Edward Fry, cited in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 218. 29. Robert Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 91. The term “professional,” which is commonly used to refer to scholars affi liated with the American Historical Association or those who are employed by colleges and universities, is somewhat unfortunate, since, as my colleague Dan Nathan reminds me, anyone who earns a living writing and then selling historical works is a professional. Nonetheless, here, as in most other works treating historiographic themes, I will use the term “professionals” to connote those with academic affi liations or Notes to Pages 7–9 { 351

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 351351 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM connections to formal organizations of history. Those referred to as “amateurs” will be presumed to be outside academe. 30. David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 31. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 98. 32. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Imagination in History,” The American Historical Review 15 (January 1910): 229, 241, 232, 250. 33. Edward S. Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States (Cincin- nati: Jones Brothers, 1900 [1896]), 530; Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 24–25. 34. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 35. Sean Wilentz, “American Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History,” New Republic, 2 July 2001, 39. 36. James E. McWilliams, “Historians of the World Unite?” The American Enterprise Online, www.facmag.com (accessed 6/28/03). See also Hillel Itale, “Controversy Hounds Popular History Writers,” Domestic News, Associated Press, http://web .lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 10/31/02). 37. Alice Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the North- ern Literary Marketplace, 1861–1868,” Book History 1.1 (1998): 107–39. 38. James Wilkinson, “A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence,” in “The Status of Evidence,” special issue, PMLA 111, no. 1 (January 1996): 80–92. 39. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 5–7, 45.

Chapter 1. When Popular History Was Popular 1. Heyward Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” in American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850–1880, vol. 64, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. John W. Rathburn and Monica M. Green (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984), 49; Donald Yan- nella, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck” in Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, vol. 3, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), 103. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, The Literati of New York (New York: J. S. Redﬁ eld, 1850), 63. On the Literary World, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Maga- zines: 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton, 1930), 766–68; and Daniel Arthur Wells, “Evert Duyckinck’s Literary World, 1847–1853: Its Views and Reviews of American Literature” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1972). See also George E. Mize, “The Contributions of Evert A. Duyckinck to the Cultural Development of Nineteenth Century America” (PhD diss., New York University, 1953), esp. 108–79. 352 } Notes to Pages 9–19

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 352352 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM 3. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Litera- ture, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1855; revised and enlarged, 1866). See also Ezra Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Li- brary of American Books, 1845–1847,” American Literature 64 (December 1992): 677–93. 4. For more on this group, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 69–220, and Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–124. 5. Poe, The Literati of New York, 63. 6. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1848). 7. Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” 53. 8. E[vert] A[ugustus] D[uyckinck], “Literary Prospects of 1845,” The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science 1 (February 1845): 146–51. 9. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence (New York: Viking, 1981). 10. Arcturus 1 (March 1841): 236–43; and 3 (January 1842): 160, cited in Widmer, Young America, 100. 11. Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library,” 682–83. For more on these libraries, see George T. Goodspeed, “The Home Li- brary,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 42 (1948): 110–18. 12. Letterbook, 29 November 1844; 24 April 1846, vol. 13: Volumes and Slipcases, and Literary Correspondence, boxes 1–17, and Index to Literary Correspon- dence, Duyckinck Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York (hereafter cited as Duyckinck Family Papers). 13. “New Literary Announcements,” New York Morning News, 18 March 1845, cited in Greenspan, 692–93 n. 18. 14. C. Hugh Holman, “Introduction” to William Gilmore Simms, Views and Re- views in American Literature, History, and Fiction (New York: Wiley and Put- nam, 1846; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), xxvii; also see The First One Hundred Fifty Years: A History of John Wiley and Sons (New York, 1957), 16–19. 15. Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library,” 678. 16. Cathy H. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 24. 17. Emily E. Ford Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, 3 vols. (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1929) 2:72, cited in The Life of Washington Notes to Pages 19–21 { 353

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 353353 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM by Mason L. Weems, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), xiii–xiv. 18. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 24. 19. Samuel G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime; or, Men and Things I Have Seen, 2 vols. (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1856), 2:256–58, cited in Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagina- tion, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 14. 20. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 24, 21. 21. Paul C. Gutjahr, “Preface,” in Popular American Literature of the 19th Century, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv–xvi, 5. 22. Lynne Farrington, “Introduction” to Exhibition Notes, “ ‘Agents Wanted’: Sub- scription Publishing in America,” special exhibit, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., 2006. The comments about “wisdom” come from “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscription Publish- ing in America: How to Sell.” 23. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 42, 10, 45, 79. 24. Simms to Duyckinck, 25 June 1845, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simmons Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 2:77, cited in Greenspan, 687. 25. Gutjahr, Popular American Literature, xv–xvi, 5. For more on subscription publishing, see Michael Hackenberg, “The Subscription Publishing Network in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Getting the Books Out: Papers on the Chicago Conference on the Book in 19th-Century America, ed. Michael Hackenberg (Wash- ington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1987), 45–75. 26. David D. Van Tassel, “Teaching Patriotism: Emphasis on Popular History, 1815–50,” in Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 43. 27. Gutjahr, Popular American Literature, xv–xvi. 28. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150. 29. Widmer, Young America, 97. 30. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150. 31. See “Americanisms” in “Words, Words, Words,” box 28, Notebooks on Ameri- can Literature, Authors, Anecdotes, History, American Notes & Queries, Ety- mology, Frankliniana, Jeffersoniana, in Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. 32. Catalogue of American Authors, box 29, Notebooks on Shakespeare, English Drama, Classics, in Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. 33. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 149. 354 } Notes to Pages 21–23

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 354354 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM 34. For more on this see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 76–108. 35. Harper’s represented competition for Duyckinck’s home library as well, having put out a few years earlier Harper’s Family Library, which “was for the most part made up of reprints.” See Goodspeed, “The Home Library,” 110. Appleton’s had a similar library titled “Appleton’s Popular Library of the Best Authors.” For more on this venture, see the advertisement in box 30, Notebook 1, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. 36. Diary entry, 5 January 1843, Duyckinck Collection, New York Public Library, cited in Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library,” 680. 37. See “Copyright Club, Proceedings, 1843–44,” box 36, Miscellaneous Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers. 38. See the extensive correspondence between Duyckinck and Simms in Literary Correspondence, box 15, Duyckinck Family Papers. On Simms’s views with respect to the copyright issue, see his articles in the Southern Literary Messenger 10 (January, March, June, and August 1844): 7–17, 137–51, 340–49, and 449–69. 39. Simms, “Article 1: Americanism in Literature,” in Views and Reviews, 7, 11–12. 40. Simms, “The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction,” in Views and Reviews, 64, 69–70. 41. Ibid., 34–36. 42. Ibid., 40–42, 44–45, 74–75. 43. Ibid., 68–75. 44. See, for instance, the historical novel by Cornelius Mathews, Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders (New York: J and H. G. Langley, 1839) in which Mathews tried to re-create the story of prehistoric life. 45. See David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850– 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 16. 46. George Lippard to Robert Morris, 3 August 1844, Historical Society of Pennsyl- vania, cited in David S. Reynolds, George Lippard (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 9–10. Simms’s Views and Reviews included a lengthy essay on Cooper’s novels as historical pieces in which he referred to Cooper’s The Spy as “the boldest and best attempt at historical romance which had ever been made in America” (260). 47. Donald Yannella and Kathleen Malone Yannella, “Evert A. Duyckinck’s Diary: May 29–November 8, 1847,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 238. 48. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 78. 49. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 46–47; “Indian Literature and Art,” in Views and Review, 146. Notes to Pages 24–28 { 355

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 355355 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM 50. Both genres were represented in the Library of Choice Reading. For a complete inventory of works published in the series and those projected but never published, see Book Lists, box 30, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. Evert also produced several works of history, including Evert A. Duyck- inck, National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans, 2 vols. (New York: John- son, Fry, 1862), and History of the World: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 4 vols., compiled by Duyckinck (New York: Johnson, Fry, 1869). 51. Alexander Dumas to Alphonse Lamartine, as paraphrased in Simon Schama, “Clio Has a Problem,” New York Times Magazine, 1 September 1991, 32. 52. Max Nordau, The Interpretation of History (New York: Wiley, 1910), 7, 35–36. 53. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 22. 54. For more on the “constructive imagination,” see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 231–49. 55. This notion of history as “made” rather than “found” is adopted from Peter Novick’s discussion of the philosopher of history Hayden White; see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histor- ical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 600. For White’s articulation of these same concepts, see White, Metahistory, 427–28, and “The Fictions of Factual Representation” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 124. 56. For more on the relationship of literary style to historical narrative, see Allan Megill and Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of History,” in The Rhetoric of Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 221–38. See also Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 627–53. 57. On the Great Story, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). 58. As Dorothy Ross notes, the grand narrative of the nineteenth century “was composed of two closely intertwined strands. One was the story of Western progress, a liberal story of growing commercial development, representative political institutions based on democratic consent, and the advance and diffusion of knowledge—processes that were projected to remake the entire world. The second was the liberal/republican story of American exceptionalism, which seated world progress in the American nation.” See Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Histori- cal Review (June 1995): 652. See also Allan Megill, “ ‘Grand Narrative’ and the 356 } Notes to Pages 29–30

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 356356 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:58:5912:58:59 PMPM Discipline of History,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151–73, 263–71. 59. White, Tropics of Discourse, 90–91. On Levi-Strauss’s conceptualization of these matters, see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Trafalgar Square, 1966) and “Overture to Le Cru et le cuit,” in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (New York: Doubleday, 1966). 60. Yannella and Yannella, “Evert A. Duyckinck’s Diary,” 238. 61. Callcott, History in the United States, 142. See also Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). 62. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse, 123. 63. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 230. 64. For more on Duyckinck’s relationships with these historians, see Literary Cor- respondence, box 13, Duyckinck Family Papers. See also Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150. 65. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 230. 66. Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library,” 688–89. 67. “Francis Parkman,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:709. For his part, Parkman acknowledged that he took “great pains” to “secure fullness and accuracy of historical detail” in Pontiac, but he also added that the work was “designed as a tableau of forest life and Indian character” and was chosen “with this view” and “not on account of any peculiar historic importance attaching to it.” See Francis Parkman to Charles Scribner, Esq., 8 May 1854, box 13, Literary Cor- respondence, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers. 68. “William H. Prescott,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:236. 69. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:699. 70. Review of Passages from the History of Liberty, North American Review 64 (April 1847): 511–12. 71. For more on Eliot and his brief career as a historian, see Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Sam- uel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: North- eastern University Press, 1991), 4–8; see also Francis Parkman to Samuel Eliot, 8 November 1856, Samuel Eliot Papers, Boston Athenaeum. For information relating to Barrett Wendell’s assessment of Eliot as historian, see Barrett Wendell, “Samuel Eliot,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 34 (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1899): 646. 72. American Antiquarian Society Seminar precis, “Poetry and History: Approaches to the Study of Nineteenth-Century American Poets, Poems, and Poetic Culture,” 13 February 2004. Notes to Pages 30–32 { 357

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 357357 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 73. Nordau, The Interpretation of History, 43. 74. Northrop Frye, “New Directions from Old,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Po- etic Mythology (New York: Harvest Books, 1963), 54–55. 75. White, “Interpretation of History,” in Tropics of Discourse, 58. 76. G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1949). 77. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 41. 78. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150, 146–47. 79. Ibid., 150. 80. Widmer, Young America, 96. 81. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:185. 82. Nathaniel Hawthorne, True Stories from History and Biography (Boston, 1851). According to Callcott, Hawthorne felt True Stories was “one of the most purposeful books he had ever written.” See Callcott, History in the United States, 198. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston, 1852). 83. Callcott, History in the United States, 12. See also Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Contributions by Bryant and Hawthorne to the Library of American Books series include Bryant’s The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (1844) and Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, 2 vols. (1846). 84. Simms, “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper,” in Views and Reviews, 291. 85. James Fenimore Cooper, History of the Navy of the United States of America (Lon- don: R. Bentley, 1839). See also Francis Parkman, “James Fenimore Cooper” (Jan. 1852) in Essays from the North American Review, 358–62, cited in Levin, History as Romantic Art, 1–12. 86. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:13. 87. Arcturus 1 (January 1841): 90, cited in Widmer, Young America, 241 n. 15. 88. Alice Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the North- ern Literary Marketplace, 1861–1868,” Book History 1.1 (1998): 109–10. 89. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:47, 51. 90. Evert A. Duyckinck, Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving (New York: Richardson, 1860). 91. Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” 56–57, and Samuel Osgood, Evert Duyck- inck, His Life, Writings, and Inﬂ uence: A Memoir (Boston: David Clapp, 1879). 92. Washington Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 2 vols. (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894 [1809]), 1:19; 2:213–14. 93. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literaure, 2:48. 94. John Spencer Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 22. 358 } Notes to Pages 32–37

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 358358 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 95. Washington Irving, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 3 vols. (New York: T. Y. Crowell, [1828]). See Washington Irving. Bibliography, vol. 30 of Complete Works of Washington Irving, comp. Edwin T. Bowden (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 221, cited in Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 108. 96. Harry Thurston Peck, William Hickling Prescott (New York, 1926), 134, cited in Bert James Loewenberg, American History in American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 291. Prescott went on to say that Irving’s history displayed some tedium and “barren repetition” in its descriptions of the period after discovery. The latter part of the quote here is Loewenberg’s summation of Prescott’s views. 97. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 124. 98. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 89–90. Levine uses this phrase with reference to popular culture (specifi cally opera) in the nineteenth century. 99. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 110. Irving’s quote comes from Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfi eld, and Jenifer S. Banks, eds., Letters of Washington Irving, 2: 1823–1838, vol. 24 of Complete Works of Washington Irving (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 325–26. 100. Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1:194. 101. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 113. 102. Monthly Review, n.s., 7 (April 1828): 419–34, cited in Bushman, America Dis- covers Columbus, 124. See also Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 341–45. 103. Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1:55 as quoted in Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 107. 104. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 40. 105. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 127. For reviews of Irving’s works see Haskell Springer, Washington Irving: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976), 21–23. The specifi c reviews referenced here come from London Weekly Re- view, 16 February 1828, 97–99; 23 February 1828, 115–17; and New York Mirror, 22 March 1828, 295, cited in Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 124. 106. The Everett quote is from Charles Adams, Memoir of Washington Irving (Free- port, N.Y.: Carlton and Lanahan, 1870), 157–58, cited in Bushman, America Dis- covers America, 124. 107. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:49–51. 108. The quote “ornamented and gaudy” is from Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 323–24. Notes to Pages 37–39 { 359

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 359359 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 109. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:49–51. 110. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Pre- conceptions,” in Memory and American History, ed. David Thelan (Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 148. 111. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reﬂ ections on a New Old History,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 289. 112. Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 125, 132, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 599. 113. Edwin Markham, The Real America in Romance, 13 vols. (New York: William H. Wise, 1909–1910), 1:vii. 114. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 200. 115. Advertisement for Wiley and Putnam’s Library of Choice Readings, box 30, Notebook 1845, and Letterbook, November 29, 1844; April 24, 1846, vol. 13: Volumes and Slipcases, and Literary Correspondence, boxes 1–17, and Index to Literary Correspondence, Duyckinck Family Papers. 116. For more on Headley and the Home Library, see Goodspeed, “The Home Li- brary,” 116–18. Headley’s volume eventually appeared in expanded form in Duyckinck’s Library of American Books, as Letters from Italy. 117. Edgar Allan Poe, The Literati of New York, 63. See also G. P. Putnam Archive, C0685, box I, folder 75, I: Correspondence, George Palmer Putnam Collection, with permission of the Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. 118. See, for instance, Benson Lossing, Harper’s Popular Cyclopaedia of United States History, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893); David Pae, A Popular History of the Discovery, Progress and Present State of America (Edinburgh: T. Grant, 1852), and Mary Botham Howitt, A Popular History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860). 119. J. N. Larned, ed., The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, 1902). This particular quotation is included in the assessment of James Johonnot’s Stories of Our Country (1887) on page 283 of Larned’s bibliography. 120. [ Joel Dorman Steele and Esther B. Steele], Barnes’ Popular History of the United States of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1875), 6. 121. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mabie’s Popular History of the United States (Philadelphia: Fidelity Publishing, 1897). 122. See, for instance, comments in The Literary News concerning the publication of Edward Eggleston’s United States History and its value as measured against other popular histories: The Literary News 9 (October 1888): 302.

360 } Notes to Pages 39–41

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 360360 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 123. For complete price lists for these and other works of history, see F. Leypoldt, ed., The American Catalogue: Author and Title Entries of Books in Print and For Sale (Industry Reports and Importations), July 1, 1876, comp. Lynds E. Jones (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1880), vol. 1, pt. 1, 271. 124. For sales ﬁ gures on Frost’s history, see S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (Philadelphia: J. B. Lip- pincott, 1908), 1:639–40. 125. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 5. 126. See, for instance, Joel T. Headley, The Great Rebellion, A History of the Civil War in the United States, 2 vols. (Chicago: R. C. Treat, 1866); John Warner Barber, Historical Scenes in the United States; or, A Selection of Important and Interesting Events in the History of the United States (New Haven: Monsin, 1827 and later editions); and Jacob Abbott, American History (New York: Sheldon, [1860–1865]). 127. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” 411. 128. For further discussion of the category “historians without portfolio,” see Loewen- berg, American History in American Thought, 490–519. 129. For more on this notion of “constructed memory,” see Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 3, 18, 33. 130. Daniel A. Nathan, Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 153. 131. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 135. 132. Theodore Roosevelt, “History as Literature,” cited in Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 519. 133. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 198. 134. Anon. [George Lippard], The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1844). The statistics on copies sold come from Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 198. 135. [John Bell Bouton], The Life and Choice Writings of George Lippard (New York: H. H. Randall, 1855), 96, cited in David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renais- sance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 206. For more on Lippard’s popularity with middle-class readers, see Paul Buhle, “George Lippard and Popular Literary Traditions,” in Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, no. 2 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1983); and Carl Bode, ed., Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840– 1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

Notes to Pages 41–43 { 361

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 361361 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 136. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Viking, 1981), 91. 137. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 199. 138. Callcott, History in the United States, 195 and front fl ap of book jacket. 139. Interestingly, Benson Lossing, who also wrote a history of the Revolution during the Mexican War, found that his work had the opposite effect. This may be due in part to the fact that Lossing was less optimistic about the Mexican War than was Lippard, suggesting that the soldiers returning from the front bore few of the signs of “military glory” that “the recollections of the recent past” might have brought them under other circumstances. See Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence, 2 vols. (1850–52; reprint, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 1:35. 140. George Lippard, Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution . . . With a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by Rev. C. Chauncey Burr (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1847), 522–25, cited in Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 61, 199–200. For more on Lippard and his signifi cance to the publishing world during this period, see George Lippard Papers, 1843–1853, folder 1, Mss. Dept., Misc. Mss. boxes L, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (hereafter cited as Lippard Papers). 141. Lippard’s Washington and His Generals was published in serialized form in the Saturday Courier: A Family Newspaper Neutral in Politics and Religion, published weekly in Philadelphia by Andrew M’Makin. See also “New Series” of “Legends of the American Revolution” (4 July 1846 to 23 December 1848). 142. Agents’ Companion (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers, 1866–1869[?]), 2, cited in Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory,” 117–18. For more on the activities of book agents, see J. Walter Stoops, The Art of Canvassing; or, The Experience of a Prac- ticed Canvasser (New York: Printed for the Author, 1857); The Book Agent: A Manual of Confi dential Instructions [n.p., n.d.], collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscription Publishing in America.” 143. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 265–66. 144. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 2–3, 5. 145. Ibid., 4, 3. 146. For more on Philadelphia publishers and their relationship to the history book trade, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and the Men of Capital: The Philadelphia Book Trade in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966). 147. George Lippard to Lawlor, Hinken & Everett, Editors of the Dispatch, 2 June 1853, Lippard Papers, folder 1. See also “Transcript of 1845 Contract with Zieber” in the same collection. 362 } Notes to Pages 43–45

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 362362 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM 148. Reynolds, George Lippard, 71. 149. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 3, 4, 6–7. 150. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage, 1965), 380–81. 151. Reynolds, George Lippard, 64–65. For a contemporary view on this issue, see M’Makin, “Mr. Lippard and His Legends,” Saturday Courier, 26 December 1846. 152. George Lippard, Legends of Mexico (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1847), 55–56, cited in Reynolds, George Lippard, 66. 153. White, “Historicism, History, and the Imagination,” in Tropics of Discourse, 106. For more on Lippard’s views concerning these matters, see “American Literature,” Citizen Soldier: A Weekly Newspaper, Devoted to the Interests of the Volunteers and Militia of the United States, 21 June 1843. Citizen Soldier was a Philadelphia newspaper edited by Isaac R. and Adam H. Diller; the Bucks County Historical Society, Pennsylvania, has a run of this paper. See also “Na- tional Literature,” Quaker City, 10 February 1849; this Philadelphia newspaper is available at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 154. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse, 85. 155. Philos [John Frost], “The Character of Washington; Its Infl uence and Impor- tance,” 11–12, 13–14, HU 89 165.50-71, Bowdoin Prize Dissertations, Harvard University Archives. 156. John Frost, Enoch Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolu- tion (Cincinnati: U. P. James [c. 1841]). 157. John Langdon Sibley, Collectanea Biographica Harvardiana: Being Obituary and Other Printed Notices of Harvardians Collected During the Preparation of the Last Twelve Triennial Catalogues of Harvard University, 1842–1875, vol. 2, n.p., as found in HUG 1791.14.10, Reel 1, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Harvard University. 158. “John Frost, 1822. A.M. 1825,” Class Publications and Records, HUG 300 and HUD 222.00, Harvard University Archives, as cited in Pfi tzer, Picturing the Past, 21–22. 159. For a full citation to these works by Frost, see O. A. Roorbach, comp. and arr., Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of American Publications Including Reprints and Original Works from 1820 to 1852, ed. John D. Morse (New York: Peter Smith, 1939), 207–8. For more on Frost as a popular historian, see Pfi tzer, Pictur- ing the Past, 21–24. 160. John Frost, The Pictorial History of the United States of America, 4 vols. (Phila- delphia: Benjamin Walker, 1844). This work was condensed and renamed Popu- lar History of the United States and appeared in many editions under both titles. The quotations I have chosen here are from The Pictorial History of the United Notes to Pages 45–49 { 363

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 363363 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0012:59:00 PMPM States of America, since that is the most comprehensive edition and the one most readily available. Frost, Pictorial History of the United States of America, v–vi. 161. Frost, Pictorial History, 2:239, 97, 213; 1:148; 2:39, 102, 127. 162. Ibid., 1:104. 163. Ibid., 1:154; 2:72; 3:13, 128. 164. Ibid., 3:71, 77, 140–41, 119. 165. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 73–75. 166. Frost, Pictorial History, 1:vii; 3:214–15, 228; 2:150; 2:189. 167. Ibid., 1:vi, 52, 53, 55, 85, 153, 160; 2:16. 168. Ibid., 1:39. 169. Richard Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histo- ries of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 9–10. Not all historians accepted these practices without question. For an alternative point of view, see George Lippard’s attacks on plagiarists of his Leg- ends of the American Revolution, Quaker City, 5 May 1849. 170. For the exchange of ideas between Frost and Irving, especially as they relate to the creation of a more humanized image of Washington, see Barbara J. Mitnick, “Parallel Visions: The Literary and Visual Image of George Washington,” in George Washington: American Symbol, ed. Barbara Mitnick (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 64–66. 171. Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory:,” 109, 123. 172. Ziff, Literary Democracy, 91. 173. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 1:v. 174. Boorstin, The Americans, 381. 175. “Index of Sources of American History” and “Lists of American Authors,” box 28, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. 176. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:699. For the correspondence between Eliot and Duyckinck regarding his inclusion in the Cyclopaedia of Amer- ican Literature, see Samuel Eliot to Charles Scribner, Esq., 12 May 1854, box 5, Literary Correspondence, Duyckinck Family Papers. 177. New York Herald, 13 February 1856. For a lengthy discussion of the contentious relationship between Duyckinck and Griswold, see Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 329–31. 178. Charles Ste[vens?] to Charles Scribner, Esq., 24 March 1856, “Blotter, 1855– 1857,” box 30, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. Duyck- inck kept a notebook that included over twenty single-spaced pages of errata for the Cyclopaedia. See “Errata—Encyclopedia of American Literature,” box 30, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. 179. Review of Prose Writers of America . . . , The American Whig Review 5, no. 4 (April 1847): 430–31; see also William McCrillis Griswold, Passages from the 364 } Notes to Pages 50–55

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 364364 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass., 1898). 180. Widmer, Young America, 97; see also the 5 December 1842 entry from “Diary, 1833–56—Loose Sheets,” vol. 5, Volumes & Slipcases, Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Collection, Mss. Division, New York Public Library. 181. For more on criticisms of Lippard in his day, see: “George Lippard: His Oppo- nents and the Public,” Saturday Courier, 29 August 1846. 182. “The Book Agent,” Lowell [Mass.] Patriot, 10 June 1836, and “The Book Pedler,” Lowell [Mass.] Daily Courier, 12 March 1847, collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscription Publishing in America: How to Sell,” University of Pennsylvania. See also later books warning against the tactics of book agents, including Bates Harrington, How ’Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted by Wandering Canvassers, Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing, 1879). 183. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 148. 184. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 199–200. Reynolds notes in George Lippard that Lippard defended French novels in an attack on Rev. Alonzo Potter in the December 30, 1848, edition of Quaker City. 185. Book Lists, and Notebook: Books of the Library of Choice Reading, box 30, Pa- pers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. For more on Duyckinck’s outlook on French ﬁ ction, see Evert A. Duyckinck, “Recent French Novelists,” American Review (March 1846): 233–40, and Evert A. Duyckinck, Literary World, 18 September 1852, 185, cited in Sheila Post-Lauria, “Genre and Ideology: The French Sensational Romance and Melville’s Pierre,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 3 (Sept 1992): 1–3. 186. M. M. Backus, “Novel Writers & Publishers,” Christian Parlor Magazine, May 1844, 20. See also “Novels: Their Meaning and Mission,” Putnam’s Monthly, October 1854, 389–96. 187. Reverend J. T. Crane, “Novels and Novel-Reading,” in Popular Amusements (Cincinnati: Walden and Stowe, 1869), 122–23, 152. 188. Evert A. Duyckinck, Advertisement wrapper, The Home Library, cited in Good- speed, 113. See also Advertisement for Wiley and Putnam’s Library of Choice Readings, box 30, Notebook 1845, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers. 189. Amy M. Thomas, “ ‘There Is Nothing So Effective as a Personal Canvass’: Reval- uing Nineteenth-Century American Subscription Books,” Book History 1 (1998): 146–47, 141–42. One of the most popular of Duyckinck’s subscription histories was National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval (New York: Johnson, Fry, 1861). 190. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 76. Notes to Pages 56–58 { 365

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 365365 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM 191. Cornelius C. Felton, “Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, Nos. IV., IX., and XII.,” North American Review 63 (October 1846): 359. For more on Fel- ton, see Cornelius C. Felton Papers, 1839–1879, Harvard University Corporation Records, 1636–Ongoing. Duyckinck defended his friend in a letter to Dear Sir, 29 April 1845, box 18, General Correspondence, 1830–53, The Literary Correspon- dence, Duyckinck Family Papers. The particular novel by Mathews under attack in this review was Big Abel and Little Manhattan (1845). 192. Hawthorne, Salem Advertiser, 2 May 2 1846, as discussed in Holman, “Introduc- tion,” xxxii 193. “Address,” October 18, 1843, The Copyright Club, cited in Goodspeed, “The Home Library,” 112. 194. Widmer, Young America, 100. 195. George W. Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, 9 April 1851, cited in Erhlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” 55. 196. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 201–7. 197. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 146. 198. George Lippard to J. Fenimore Cooper, 21 May 1844, and George Lippard to Robert Morris, Esq., 2 August 1844, Lippard Papers, folder 1. 199. Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, ed. Rollo Ogden (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 2:33–34, cited in Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory,” 128–29. For his part, Duyckinck also disapproved of some of Ab- bott’s work, noting that while it “is written in a popularly attractive style, with much success as a narrative,” it has “provoked considerable opposition by its highly eulogistic view.” See Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:354–55. 200. Edward Lawrence Godkin, Nation, 23 November 1865, 661, cited in Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory,” 129. 201. Edward Lawrence Godkin, Nation, 19 May 1870, 319–20, cited in Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory,” 130. 202. For more on the cult of objectivity in theology and science, see E. Brooks Holi- ﬁ eld, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and The- odore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-Bellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 203. See Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The Ameri- can Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). 366 } Notes to Pages 58–64

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 366366 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM 204. For more on the rise of the American Historical Association, see John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1965), 6–25; and Novick, That Noble Dream, 47–60. 205. For more on such symbolic designs, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 7–21. 206. Novick, That Noble Dream, 21. 207. Memoranda of the Literary Career of Washington Irving by E.A.D., vol. 17: Vol- umes & Slipcases, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers. 208. Shi, Facing Facts, 66. 209. George B. Herbert, The Popular History of the Civil War in America (1861–1865) (New York: F. M. Lupton, 1884), xii. 210. Shi, Facing Facts, 68. 211. C. M. Andrews, “These Forty Years,” American Historical Review 30 (January 1925): 225, 22, 228, 230, 237, 238. 212. Felton, “Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books,” 378–79, 381. 213. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” 123–25. 214. Novick, That Noble Dream, 45. 215. Glenn Kaye, “A Certain Simon Schama,” Harvard Magazine, November– December 1991, 48. 216. James Harvey Robinson, “The New Allies of History” (1910), reprinted in Rob- inson, The New History (New York, 1912), 99, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 91. 217. Novick, That Noble Dream, 46, 101, 111. 218. Nordau, The Interpretation of History, 394. 219. Larned, The Literature of American History, 62. 220. J. Franklin Jameson, History of Historical Writing in America (Boston: Hough- ton Miffl in, 1891), 91. 221. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889) and Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American History (Boston: Ginn, 1897). The numbers regarding the editions and issues of Frost’s works are cited in Jack Carter Thompson, “Images for Americans in Popular Survey Histories, 1820–1912” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1976), 390. 222. Robert H. Dabney, “Is History a Science?” American Historical Association Pa- pers, 5: 263–64. See also W. Stull Holt, “The Idea of Scientifi c History in Amer- ica,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 252–62; and Edward N. Saveth, “Scientifi c History in America: The Eclipse of an Idea,” in Essays in American Historiography, ed. Donald A. Sheehan and Harold C. Syrett (New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1960), 1–19. Notes to Pages 64–69 { 367

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 367367 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM 223. Novick, That Noble Dream, 134. 224. John William Burgess, “On Methods of Historical Study,” as quoted in Methods of Teaching and Studying History, ed. G. Stanley Hall (Boston, 1886), 219. 225. Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians, 19, 22–24. 226. James Harvey Robinson, “Popular Histories and their Defects,” International Monthly, July 1900, 47–73. 227. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Es- says (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 297. 228. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 126, 232. 229. Jameson, History of Historical Writing in America, 154–55. 230. Ibid., 144.

Chapter 2. The “Terrible Image Breaker” 1. Charles Knight, The Popular History of England (New York: Richard Worthing- ton, [n.d.]; originally London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856), preface, i–v. 2. “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March 1874, 4. 3. William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 4 vols. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876–1881). 4. Margaret Becket, “Charles Scribner’s Sons,” in American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899, Part 2: N–Z, ed. Peter Dzwonkoski, vol. 49 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), 412. 5. “Characteristics of the Work” in the “Prospectus” for Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, Salesman’s Dummy for book agent Ralph Coxhead (1875), in possession of the author. 6. “Preface” to Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, vii. The version of the preface cited here is the fi rst to appear in print, Part I of the “subscription-only” version of the history, published in 1876 (republished in 1878 and in possession of the author). 7. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 2. The only other poet of suffi cient national reputation who might have been suitable for the job was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who was under contract with the publishing fi rm of Jones Osgood in Boston to produce popular children’s histories based on poetic retellings of important events in the American past. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill Battle (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875). 8. A[llan] N[evins], “William Cullen Bryant,” in Dictionary of American Biogra- phy, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 19:204. 9. Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 1:334. 10. Albert F. McLean, Jr., William Cullen Bryant, Twayne’s United States Authors Series (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964), 108–31. A similar argument is pre- 368 } Notes to Pages 69–76

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 368368 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM sented in slightly different form in Harry Houston Peckham, Gotham Yankee: A Biography of William Cullen Bryant (New York: Vantage, 1950), 180. 11. Nevins, “William Cullen Bryant,” 204. 12. For a description of some of these responses to Bryant’s death and his legacy, see William Cullen Bryant II, “William Cullen Bryant after 100 Years,” in William Cullen Bryant and His America: Centennial Conference Proceedings, 1878–1978, ed. Stanley Brodwin and Michael D’Innocenzo (New York: AMS, 1983). The Twain anecdote appears on page 1 of this volume. 13. On Bryant’s struggle to become a more accessible public fi gure, see Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 509– 24. 14. William Cullen Bryant, ed., assisted by Evert A. Duyckinck, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Stratford Edition (New York: Amies, 1888); The Iliad of Homer, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1870); The Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1871); with Oliver Bell Bunce, Picturesque America (New York: D. Appleton, 1872–74). For a thorough bibliography of Bryant’s literary works in this period, see Donald Ringe, “William Cullen Bry- ant,” in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, supp. 1, part 1, ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), 150–73. 15. For more on Bryant’s interests in history, see Donald A. Ringe, “Bryant’s Use of the American Past,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 41 (1956): 323–31. 16. William Cullen Bryant, October 1875, “Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons,” Author Files I, box 23, folder: “Bryant, William Cullen,” Special Collections, Princeton University Archives, Princeton University (hereafter cited as Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives). Published with permission of the Princeton Univer- sity Library, Princeton, N.J. 17. For details of the contract which netted Bryant in excess of $40,000, see “Records of Sales,” 1 May 1879 and 1 February 1884, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 18. The prospectus included the following statement: “Admirable histories of Amer- ica, of the United States of different portions of both, and of many distinguished men whose lives at one time or another have helped to make those histories, have been written and are familiar to scholars. Some of them cover one period and some another; and some are more, some less, full and exhaustive. But a popular history, in the true sense of that term, one that shall be instructive through the sense of sight as well as through the labor of perusal; one which is sought for by that immense number of readers with whom literature is not a profession, but who choose to be well informed in the history of their own and other countries, however much their lives may be absorbed in other pursuits—a popular history of this sort, compendious, and not appalling from its size, accurate without being Notes to Pages 76–77 { 369

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 369369 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0112:59:01 PMPM tedious, and one that at the same time shall be attractive by its appeal to the love of the picturesque and the artistic, has as yet no existence. Such it is meant bryant’s History shall be, and the name of that distinguished author is an assurance of its success.” See “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March 1874, 4. 19. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:vii. 20. Edward Cheyney, “What Is History?” an address delivered to the Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania, 3 October 1907, cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Pro- fession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46. 21. William Cullen Bryant to John Bryant, May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cullen Bryant, 502. 22. “The Past,” in The Poems of William Cullen Bryant, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Heritage Press, 1947), 112–13. 23. “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:xxiii–xxiv. The original draft of this preface can be found in [Preface], October 1875, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 24. Ibid., 1:vii–viii. For more on the use of the conventions of the theater in nineteenth- century historical writing, see David Levin, History as Romantic Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 19–21. 25. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 38. 26. Bryant, “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xxi, xxiii, xx. 27. Ibid., vii, viii, xiii, x, xi. 28. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 1–9. 29. The surge of melodrama in the United States owed much to “the inspirational value of contemporary American history, far more epic and colourful than Eng- lish history of the same period. The westward drive of the pioneer, the conﬂ ict with Indians, the frenzied rush for gold, the grimness of slavery, the fury of the Civil War—these themes lent themselves admirably to melodrama,” Michael Booth has noted. “Life lived on the frontier or in a gold camp was melodramatic.” Michael Booth, Hiss the Villain: Six English and American Melodramas (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 36, 31. 30. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 269. See also Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Cul- ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 31. Bryant, “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xvi–xvii. 32. Ibid., xvi–xvii. 33. Ibid., xxiii. 370 } Notes to Pages 77–82

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 370370 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM 34. Circular advertising Bryant’s Popular History, pasted in Salesman’s Dummy for Ralph Coxhead (1875), 8. 35. Booth, “Introduction,” in Hiss the Villain, 21. 36. Theodore S. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” in “AHR Forum: The Old History and the New,” American Historical Review 94 ( June 1989): 656–57. 37. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” 657. 38. Novick, That Noble Dream, 46. 39. For Bryant’s self-assessment of his work as an historian, see William Cullen Bry- ant to John Bryant, 11 May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cullen Bryant, 502. See also Ringe, “Bryant’s Use of the American Past,” 323–31. 40. Mary Otis Gay Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” typescript, Special Manuscript Collections, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. (hereafter cited as Gay Papers), 13. For more on Gay’s life and work, see “Sydney Howard Gay,” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 7, 195, and “Sydney Howard Gay,” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (New York: James T. White, 1921), 494. 41. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 2. 42. William Cullen Bryant to John Bryant, 11 May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cul- len Bryant, 502. 43. W. C. Bryant, [Handwritten Note on Authorship], October 1875, in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 44. William Cullen Bryant to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., box 4, Gay Papers. For further information on the ﬁ nancial aspects of the production of Bryant’s, see J. Blair Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 31 August 1878 and 11 November 1878, box 60, Gay Papers, and Martin Gay to Charles Scribner’s Sons, 12 April 1889, and the “Copyright Notices,” from 14 May 1878, 1 June 1878, 14 August 1878, 1 May 1879, and 1 February 1889, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 45. “Advanced to Authors of Bryant’s History,” Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 46. Originally Gay received 30 cents per volume sold and Bryant 15 cents. Those numbers were later adjusted to 24 cents per volume for Gay and 12 cents per volume for Bryant. See “Memo on Copyright on Bryant’s History of the U.S., March 9, 1874,” and “By agreement dated May 27, 1875,” in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 47. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 2. 48. Sydney Howard Gay to William Cullen Bryant, 5 November 1875, box 7, Bry- ant–Godwin Papers, New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archives Divi- sion, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter cited as Bryant–Godwin Papers). Notes to Pages 82–86 { 371

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 371371 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM 49. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 4. 50. Bryant to Gay, 26 March 1878, box 4, Gay Papers. 51. Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” typescript, box 4, Gay Papers, 5–7. 52. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided, 270, 11. 53. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xxii. 54. Ibid., 1:vi. 55. For more on these exchanges, see “Miscellaneous Manuscripts, MS. and Notes for History of the U.S.,” box 74, Gay Papers. 56. Bryant to Gay, 11 November 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 57. Bryant to Gay, 23 July 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 58. Bryant to Gay, 11 November 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 59. Bryant to Gay, 24 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 60. By May of 1878, Scribner’s had already spent $89,525.88 on Bryant’s Popular History, while sales of the fi rst volume had reached only 7300. At a retail price of $6.00 a volume, total revenues were only $43,800. See “Bryant Copyright,” 14 May 1878, and Scribner’s to Bryant, 14 August 1878, in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 61. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:2, 7, 2, 13, 65, 52, 88, 13. 62. Ibid., 1:20, 34, 88. 63. This entire exchange is recounted in Gay to Bryant, 5 November 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 64. “New Publications,” New York Times, 15 May 1876, 2. 65. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:112, 105, 101–2. 66. Bryant to Gay, 21 October 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 67. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:112, 105, 101–2. 68. Gay to Bryant, 25 July 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 69. Bryant to Gay, 8 October 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 70. For more on Smith and myths of American origins as they relate to William Cul- len Bryant, see Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 45. 71. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:273, 287. For more on the nineteenth-century historiography with reference to the Smith–Pocahontas episode, see Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 2005), 64, 65–66, 72. 72. Bryant to Gay, 28 January 1876, box 4, Gay Papers. 73. Gay to Bryant, 15 November 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. At least one reviewer agreed with Bryant’s concerns, asking, “Have the authors in the fi rst volume . . . done justice to Captain John Smith?” See “Contemporary Literature,” North American Review 127 (November–December 1878): 511. 372 } Notes to Pages 86–91

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 372372 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM 74. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:340, 443. 75. Bryant to Gay, 16 March 1876, box 4, Gay Papers. 76. J. Franklin Jameson, The History of Historical Writing in America (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, 1891), 97–98. 77. Gay to Bryant, 17 March [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 78. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 2:343. 79. Gay to Bryant, 17 March [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 80. Bryant to Gay, 16 March 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 81. Gay to Bryant, 17 March 17 [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 82. Bryant to Gay, 23 December 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 83. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:311. 84. Gay to Bryant, 17 March [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 85. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:391. 86. Ibid., 1:391, 393, 396–97. For more on Bryant’s conception of the Plymouth landing, see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 97. 87. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:311, 537, 2:187, 2:84. 88. Gay’s note was in reference to Henry Martyn Dexter (1821–1890), who was editor of the Congregationalist from 1851 to 1890 and wrote and preached widely on seventeenth-century New England. 89. Bryant to Gay, 7 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 90. Gay to Bryant, [8?] September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 91. Bryant to Gay, 7 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 92. Gay to Bryant, [8?] September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 93. Ibid. 94. Bryant to Gay, 11 September 1877, Gay Papers. 95. Circular advertising Bryant’s Popular History, pasted in Salesman’s Dummy (1875), 8. 96. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:19, 2:1, 12–13, 17–18. 97. Bryant to Gay, 7 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 98. Gay to Bryant, 5 October [1877], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 99. Gay to Bryant, September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. Palfrey refers to John Gorham Palfrey, who wrote A Compendious History of New England from the Discovery by Europeans to the First General Congress of the Anglo-American Colonies, 4 vols. (Boston, 1858–1864). 100. Bryant to Gay, 21 December 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. The “most prominent historian of the case” mentioned here is probably Benson J. Lossing, who exonerated Hull in The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868). 101. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:189. Notes to Pages 91–98 { 373

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 373373 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM 102. Bryant to Gay, 9 October 1876, box 4, Gay Papers. 103. For Gay’s discussion of the formation of the Party, see Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 2:421. Bryant showed some restraint in the matter of obliging friends and correspondents, declining to buy an eighteenth-century letter from George Harvey Hamilton on the grounds that it did not provide any new information for the history. See Bryant to George Harvey Hamilton, 18 March 1875, Group 436, Item F-4, Yale Collection of American Literature Manuscript Miscel- lany, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 104. For other notes on Bryant’s stylistic suggestions, see 8 January 1876, 11 February 1876, 17 March 1876, 6 April 1876, 10 April 1876, and 14 April 1876, box 4, Gay Papers. The reviewer for the North American Review also declared Gay’s style marked by too many “obscurities of expression” that Bryant’s “trained critical eye” could not tolerate. “Contemporary Literature” 510. 105. Bryant to Gay, 24 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 106. Bryant to Gay, 8 September 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 107. Bryant to Gay, 5 January 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 108. Bryant to Gay, 15 March 1876 and 5 May 1877 box 4, Gay Papers. 109. Bryant to Gay, 15 March 1876 box 4, Gay Papers. 110. Bryant to Gay, 5 January 1877, box 4, Gay Papers. 111. Bryant to Gay, 8 January 1876, box 4, Gay Papers. 112. Bryant to Gay, 1 November 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 113. Gay to Bryant, 4 July [1877?], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 114. Bryant to Gay, 5 January 1875, box 4, Gay Papers. 115. Gay to Bryant, September [1877], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 116. “Mr. Bryant’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 9 December 1875, 4. 117. “Characteristics of the Work” in the “Prospectus” for Bryant’s Popular History, Salesman’s Dummy and Ledger. 118. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing]” box 76, Gay Papers. 119. “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March 1874, 4. 120. For sales ﬁ gures, see 14 May 1[8]78, Subscription Department, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Author Files I, box 23, folder 1: “Bryant, William Cul- len,” Princeton University. 121. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing]” box 76, Gay Papers. 122. Owl 1 (October 1875): 1, cited in David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illus- trated Book (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 115. 123. “Everything in regard to the composition of the Illustrated History of the United States is done on consultation with me; every sentence that goes to press, has undergone and will undergo my rigid revision and the whole will be published 374 } Notes to Pages 98–101

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 374374 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM under my responsibility,” Bryant assured readers. See Salesman’s Dummy, Bry- ant’s Popular History (1875), 1. 124. For a complete recounting of the history of the authorship of Bryant’s Popular History from the perspective of Scribner’s Sons, see “Publishers’ Introduction” to the 1896 edition, revealingly retitled Scribner’s Popular History of the United States (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1896), vii–vii. 125. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 9 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers. 126. Gay to Bryant, 22 June 187[7?], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 127. Gay to Bryant, 17 March [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. 128. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 September 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. See also Bryant to Gay, 13 December 1875, in which Bryant asks Gay “to point out in what respects” a proposed chapter by another of these additional authors, Dr. Weiss, “does not suit the purposes of the History.” For comments on Gay’s rejection of the Weiss chapter, see 20 December 1875, in the same collection. 129. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 February 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 130. Ibid. 131. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 14 July 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 132. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 2:vi. 133. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 23 March 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 134. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 23 March 1880 and 14 July 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 135. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 16 August 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. An undated note from Scribner’s to Gay in the Charles Scribner’s Sons File at Princeton indicates that at one point Scribner’s estimated it would need to sell 27,066 additional copies of each volume (or 108,264 volumes altogether) to recover the costs of its advances to Gay. See Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 136. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 September 1880, box 60, Gay Pa- pers. For Gay’s testy response to these reductions, see 13 December 1880. 137. I have borrowed this phrase from Thomas Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutral- ity: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 138. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 4:294, 175, 218, 292–93. 139. Ibid., 3:65 n. 2, 65. 140. Ibid., 1:x. 141. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 4. 142. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 3:544, 4:91, 265, 291. 143. Ibid., 4:359, 263, 393. 144. “Records of Fugitive Slaves Aided, 1855–59, 2 volumes (and money spent),” box 72, Gay Papers. Notes to Pages 102–107 { 375

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 375375 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0212:59:02 PMPM 145. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:359, 263, 393, 415, 316, 324, 1:x, 4:332. 146. Ibid., 4:440 n. 1. While Gay worked for the Tribune, he wrote many pieces for Horace Greeley, some of which, his family claimed, secured Greeley political positions. Later he became sensitive to this issue of authorship: in September 1864, Gay ended a letter to his wife; “Public affairs never looked so hopeful. Didst thou read my article in last Tuesday’s paper ‘Where We Are.’ It has made a great deal of sensation and on the strength of it, I hear Mr. Greeley was chosen Elector at large for this state. Of course it was attributed to him and was his precisely in so far that he assented to its going into the paper.” For more on Gay’s negative feelings toward Greeley as a political candidate, see “Why We Should Vote for Grant—and Not For Greeley,” box 73, Gay Papers. For more on Bryant’s attitudes regarding these same issues, see Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). 147. Mary Otis Gay Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” typescript, Gay Papers, 12. See also “Stories of the Gay Family by Mother,” in the same collection. 148. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:335, 438, 444. 149. For more on Gay’s involvement in the temperance movement, see newspaper articles by Gay in the Hingham Partriot, box 73, Gay Papers. 150. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:330, 2:349. 151. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 5. 152. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xx. 153. Ibid., 4:600. 154. Charles Scribner to Gay, 22 October 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 155. Eventually Charles Scribner’s Sons did update the series to include coverage of the period from 1865 until 1893 in an 1897 edition of ﬁ ve volumes. The revised text was provided by Noah Brooks. William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Howard Gay, and Noah Brooks, Scribner’s Popular History of the United States, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). The above quote comes from the “Publish- er’s Introduction” to this edition, vii–viii. 156. Gay’s proposed preface is cited in Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 157. Scribner to Gay, 13 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 158. Gay to Scribner, n.d., box 60, Gay Papers. Gay’s response is folded into the letter cited. 159. Gay to Scribner, n.d., box 60, Gay Papers. Gay’s response is folded into the letter cited. 160. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 161. “Record of Sales, 1 February 1884,” in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 376 } Notes to Pages 107–112

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 376376 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM 162. Gay’s response is included in 13 December 1880 in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives. 163. Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” 6. See also Willcox, “Stories of the Gay Family by Mother,” 10. 164. Sydney Howard Gay to Charles Scribner, a letter folded into Scribner to Gay, 13 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 165. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 166. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, vol. 1, part 2 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1877), 455. 167. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 2:2 (1878), 70. 168. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing],” “History of the United States,” box 76, Gay Papers. 169. “[Endorsement by Rev. H. C. Haydn],” “History of the United States,” box 76, Gay Papers. 170. “Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Review 57 (June–November 1878): 786. 171. “[Endorsement by Jared Kirkland],” “History of the United States,” box 76, Gay Papers. 172. “Culture and Progress,” Scribner’s Monthly 16 (May–October 1878): 749. 173. Benson J. Lossing to Henry Johnson, 22 March 1877, Addenda I, box 17, Lossing Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 174. American Bibliopolist (February 1877): 14–15. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid., 15. 177. Ibid., 15–16. 178. Ibid., 17. 179. On Gay’s original responsibilities to “furnish designs for its history,” see Bryant to Gay, 23 March 1874, box 4, Gay Papers. For what appear to be Gay’s notes on possible illustrations for Bryant’s Popular History, see box 73 in the same collection. 180. For more on Gay’s pictorial preferences, see his collection of visual materials in box 75, Gay Papers. His collection included photo albums with pictures of Civil War scenes (Ruins of Mrs. Henry House, Bull Run; Soldiers Graves at Bull Run; Slave Pens in Alexandria, Virginia, etc.). He also collected colorized cards showing romantic Nature scenes and owned an F. O. C. Darley lithograph entitled “Emigrants attacked by Indians.” 181. Scribner to Gay, 14 July 1880, box 60, Gay Papers. 182. Scribner to Gay, 19 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers. 183. E. V. Lucas, Life and Work of Edwin Austin Abbey, R. A., 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 34–35. The comment belongs to illustrator J. E. Kelly. Notes to Pages 112–117 { 377

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 377377 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM 184. See, for instance, Winslow Homer’s “March Against the Indians in Connecti- cut,” which depicts the expedition of Dutch and English settlers against the In- dians under John Underhill in 1644, of which Gay had written: “A night march through the February snows brought the little army of a hundred and fi fty men to the outskirts of the Indian town. . . . The moonlight was so clear and strong that ‘many winter’s days were not brighter.’ ” Homer’s illustration of the scene is highly effective but inconsistent with the written text, since the artist has this “little army” inappropriately “outfi tted uniformly in helmeted military dress.” For a discussion of this and other “historical inaccuracies” in illustrations reproduced in Bryant’s Popular History see David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 116–17. 185. See, for instance, the illustration “Mrs. Murray Entertaining the British Offi cers,” by Edwin A. Abbey in Scribner’s Monthly (January 1876). 186. Ken Kempcke, “Edwin Austin Abbey,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 188, ed. Steve E. Smith, Catherine A. Hastedt, and Donald H. Dyal (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998) 4–5, 7. 187. Ibid., 6–8. 188. Henry James, “Edwin A. Abbey,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (4 December 1886): 786– 87. See also Henry James, Picture and Text (New York: Harper, 1893), 44–60. 189. “Contemporary Literature,” 509 190. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:555, 396–97. 191. Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book, 115. 192. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 2:vi. 193. McRae’s petition was published in pamphlet form as Col. Sherwin McRae, Washington: His Person as Represented by the Artists: Houdon Statue, Its History and Value (Richmond, Va.: R. F. Walker, 1873). 194. See also Scribner to Gay, 9 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers. 195. This rival image of Washington was advanced by James Grant Wilson, who hoped to capitalize on the new popular interest in history by mass marketing ‘“an heroic size bust” of Washington through the Washington Bust and Statu- ette Company. Wilson’s statue was a composite production, modeled after both the Houdon mask and the Stuart portrait, both artists having realized effectively in his estimation “the popular sentiment and opinion of Washington.” See “The Washington Bust and Statuette Company,” Miscellaneous Papers, box 28, Loss- ing Addenda 1, Lossing Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Bryant’s endorsement can be found in Bryant to Wilson MacDonald, 25 May 1876, as excerpted in this circular and in “A New George Washington,” New York Evening Post, 20 March 1877. 196. For a discussion of the critical response to pictorial images generated from Stu- art likenesses by Scribner’s and other publishers, see esp. “Houdon’s Cast of 378 } Notes to Pages 118–119

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 378378 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM Washington: Letter from Benson Lossing,” 23 March 1877, Miscellaneous Pa- pers, box 28, Lossing Addenda 1, Lossing Papers, Huntington Library. See also “Houdon’s Washington: Benson J. Lossing Reviews the Testimony and Closes the Controversy,” 17 May 1877, New York Evening Post. 197. “Books: Literary News and Notes from New York,” Boston Daily Globe, 8 April 1874, 3. 198. “New Literature: The Latest Work of the Venerated Poet,” Boston Daily Globe, 3 June 1876, 11. 199. This discussion of “cumulative” approaches to history is adapted from Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 [1997]), 41–42. 200. “Bryant’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 8 September 1878, 10. 201. “Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Monthly 57 (June–November 1878): 786. 202. In 1889, total sales of each volume were as follows: vol. 1: 18,195; vol. 2: 17,654; vol. 3: 16,475; vol. 4: 15,761. Such total sales (68,085 for all four volumes) were well under the 108,264 volumes Scribner’s projected it needed to break even on the project. See “Account,” 1 February 1889, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Ar- chives. 203. Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Organization and Proceedings, Saratoga, Sep- tember 9–10, 1884,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), ii. 204. Right Reverend C. F. Robertson, “The Louisiana Purchase in its Inﬂ uence Upon the American System,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 4 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), 24–25. 205. This episode is recounted in Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:136, 140, 142, and “Note.” 206. For a synopsis of this exchange, see Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Proceed- ings, Second Annual Meeting, Saratoga, September 8–10, 1885,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 6 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886), 33–34. 207. “Judge Campbell’s Remarks,” in ibid., 30–32. 208. This phrase is borrowed from the subtitle of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thel- an’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

Chapter 3. The Metahistorian as Popularizer 1. The Magazine of American History, vol. 1, part 2 (1877): 455. 2. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–46. 3. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 11–12. Notes to Pages 119–124 { 379

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 379379 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM 4. Jeanne Chattin, “Grandfather Ridpath and His Friends,” folder 1, Ridpath Papers, courtesy of DePauw University Archives and Special Collections, Greencastle, Indiana (hereafter cited as Ridpath Papers). For more on Ridpath’s childhood, see “Thorntown 100 Years Old: Boone County, Indiana, Town Celebrates Cen- tury of Progress,” 25 October 1930, folder 10; “Semi-Centennial Reception in Honor of Dr. John Clark Ridpath”; and “Journal of Walking Trip, 1862,” Diary of T. B. Wood, vol. 1, pp. 4–5. For secondary sources on the details of Ridpath’s life and career, see William W. Carson, “John Clark Ridpath,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 15:559, and “John Clark Ridpath,” in The National Cyclopaedia of Ameri- can Biography (New York: James T. White, 1929), 6:485; see also “John Clark Ridpath,” The Review of Reviews Magazine (March 1895): 294–96. 5. Tucker Woodson Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” (Cincinnati, 1894), 6. 6. “1861 Ridpath Diary,” 17 January and 19 January 1861, Ridpath Papers. 7. Ibid., 7 January 1861. 8. Ibid., 28 February 1861. 9. Ibid., 5 January 1861. Ridpath cites The [New York] Ledger as an example of such a radical literary journal. For more on this publication and its reputation, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865, vol. 2 of A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 356–63. 10. “1861 Ridpath Diary,” 1 January 1861, Ridpath Papers. 11. Ibid., 28 January 1861. 12. Ibid., 28 January 1861. 13. Ibid., 16 January 1861. 14. Ibid., 12 February 1861. 15. Ibid., 4 March 1861. 16. Ibid., 27 February 1861. 17. Ibid., 17 March 1861. 18. For more on this valedictory speech, see “Register, Typed pages from the John Clark Ridpath Semi-Centennial Celebration Volumes,” DC-37, Ridpath Papers. 19. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 7. 20. For more on these “herren doktoren,” see John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 92– 103. 21. For a discussion of the rise of history as an independent discipline at Harvard, see Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 15–21.

380 } Notes to Pages 125–129

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 380380 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM 22. John Clark Ridpath, “The Man in History,” Indiana Historical Society Publica- tions, vol. 2, no. 7 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1893), 271. 23. M[ary] E[lsie] Thalheimer, A Manual of Mediaeval and Modern History (Cincin- nati: Wilson Hinkle, 1874). 24. “Annual Report to the President of Indiana Asbury University,” [1878], folder 4, Ridpath Papers. See also John C. Ridpath to President Alexander Martin,” [1884–85], in the same collection. 25. Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe, from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution (New York: D. Apple- ton, 1867). 26. Clifton J. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” DePauw Alumnus, December 1957, 2. 27. “Dr. Parr” as cited in “John Clark Ridpath: Memorial Services Held in His Honor,” DePauw Palladium, 28 January 1901, 9. See also Thomas Arnold to Doctor Ridpath, 31 March 1891, in “Register, Typed pages from the John Clark Ridpath Semi-Centennial Celebration Volumes.” 28. Phillips, “John Clark Ridpath,” 2. 29. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 273–75, 277–79. 30. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 14. 31. There were, of course, other Centennial popular histories on the market, especially Benson Lossing’s Our Country: A Household History for All Readers, 3 vols. (New York: Henry J. Johnson, 1875–1878). For a discussion of this and other Centennial works, see “A String for the Pearls: The Centennial Celebration and Humanizing History,” in Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated His- tories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithson- ian Institution Press, 2002), 127–58. 32. [Advertisement for Distributing Agents], John Clark Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1877), in possession of the author. 33. Salesman’s Dummy/Advertisement, A Popular History of the United States, folder 12-DC 37, Ridpath Papers. See also the salesman’s dummy for this volume, including the publisher’s descriptive announcement, in Z780 R547 P876; Zinman 1363, Publishers’ Sample and Canvassing Books, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 34. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, iv. 35. Ibid., 349–51. 36. See, for instance, the heroic portrait of General Greene in William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 4:40–48. The quoted material here

Notes to Pages 129–134 { 381

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 381381 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0312:59:03 PMPM comes from The Reader’s Digest Family Encyclopedia of American History (Pleas- antville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, 1975), 475–76. 37. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 160. 38. Ibid., 225–26; 230, 234. 39. Ibid., 150–53. 40. See, for instance, the historian William Dunlap’s treatment of the 1741 New York slave riots in History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York and State of New York to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (New York: Carter and Thorp, 1839–40), 1:320–50. For a discussion of the historiographic treatment of this incident, see T. Wood Clarke, “The Negro Plot of 1741,” New York History 25, no. 1 (April 1944): 167–81. 41. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 182. 42. George E. Croscup, History Made Visible: Croscup’s United States History with Synchronic Charts, Maps and Statistical Diagrams (New York: Windsor, 1911), 3. For a more detailed description of the Bern method, see Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past, 163. 43. William M. Sloane, “History and Democracy,” American Historical Review 1 (October 1895): 4. 44. See, for instance, John Frost’s Popular History of the United States (New York: Hurst, 1881 [1845]) in which he devotes separate chapters to the development of individual colonies. 45. See Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:457 and 2:41–45. 46. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 123. 47. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 114, 109. 48. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, preface. 49. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 141. 50. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, xxxvii, 43, 50. 51. Ibid., 42, 45, 47, 50. 52. See Edward Maria Wingﬁ eld, A Discourse of Virginia, ed. Charles Deane, in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 4 (Worces- ter, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1860), 67–103, and Henry Adams, “Captain John Smith,” North American Review 104 (January 1867): 1–30. See also Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 53. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 95–101. 54. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popu- lar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 30. 55. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 187–88. 382 } Notes to Pages 135–142

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 382382 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM 56. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 125. 57. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 245–47. 58. Prospectus for John C. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States of America (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscrip- tion Publishing in America: The World—Past & Present, Near & Far,” Special On-line Exhibit, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. 2006. 59. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 10. 60. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 632. 61. For sales ﬁ gures, see American Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made Men of the State of Indiana, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: Western Biographical Publishing, 1880), 1:36–37. 62. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath, DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3. 63. American Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made Men, 1:36–37. 64. Woodrow Wilson to Henry Mills Alden, 22 January 1900, Papers of Woodrow Wil- son, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 12:82–83. 65. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), 572–73. 66. J. N. Larned, ed., The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, 1902), 289. 67. “Obituary of Abraham Ridpath,” by John Clark Ridpath, n.d., folder 10, Ridpath Papers. See also “To the Memory of a Workingman—Abraham Ridpath” (New York, 1896), folder 2, in the same collection. 68. See Ridpath’s comments in his student diary, 13 February 1861, Ridpath Papers. 69. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 275. 70. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3. For a description of some of Ridpath’s public lectures, see “Lecture Series Programs,” Bushnell Scrapbook, vol. 319, 228, DePauw University. See also “The Relation of Wealth to Knowledge,” by John Clark Ridpath, 1868, Papers of Guy Morrison Walker, DC 487, folder 24, in the same collection. 71. “Annual Report to the President of Indiana Asbury University,” [1878], folder 4, Ridpath Papers. See also John C. Ridpath to President Alexander Martin, [1884– 85], in the same collection. 72. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 15. 73. George Bancroft to John Clark Ridpath, [n.d.], folder 5, Ridpath Papers. The war itself took place in 1878, so the letter probably dates from that year. 74. See, for instance, Ridpath’s use of materials from the Greencastle Daily Sun as chronicled in folder 3 and folder 12, Ridpath Papers. Notes to Pages 142–147 { 383

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 383383 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM 75. Ridpath to James Whitcomb Riley, 18 September 1890, Riley MSS., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (hereafter cited as Riley MSS.) 76. Higham, History, 94. 77. Ridpath to Hon. Board of Trustees and Visitors, 17 June 1884, folder 5, Ridpath Papers. 78. Ridpath to James C. John, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and Visitors,” 1 July 1885, folder 5, Ridpath Papers. 79. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 14. In this transition, Ridpath shared much in common with another historian, Henry Adams, who had left his position as an assistant professor of history at Harvard in 1877 to pursue work as an independent philosopher of history. Adams quit teaching because he felt he had been a distinct “failure” as an educator, having “succumbed to the weight of a system” that he regarded as “wrong” because it approached history as a “catalogue” and a “record” that stifl ed creativity. He had tried at Harvard to impose “Ger- many on his scholars with a heavy hand,” but he felt his methods were “a hundred years behind the experimental sciences” and “less instructive than Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas.” See Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1973 [1918]), 304, 300–301; William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientifi c Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), esp. 291–317; and Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 2005), 87–103. 80. John C. Ridpath, History of the World (Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1885; The Ridpath Historical Society, 1925). 81. For more on Sever, see “Henry Edwin Sever Memorial Hall,” Washington Uni- versity in St. Louis Web site, www.ustl.edu/tour/hilltop/sever.html. 82. Marshall W. Fishwick, Illustrious American: Jane Addams (Morristown, N.J.: Sil- ver Burdett, 1968), 9–20. 83. Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880). Wallace shared much in common with Ridpath concerning the role of history in the popular imagination. 84. Meredith Nicholson, The Hoosiers (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 2. 85. Taylor, “John C. Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 13. 86. Ridpath to Riley, 2 November 1895, Collection of James Whitcomb Riley, Indi- ana University. See also Ridpath’s comments about the need for Western Writers to demonstrate “the stamp of originality,” in “ ‘Publishers and Authors’: A Paper Delivered at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the WAW,” IPQ 810.6 W 527m (1891–97), vol. 2, Indiana State Library. 87. The Current, 29 January 1887, vol. 7, no. 163, folder 11, “Miscellaneous Pamphlets, 1887–1890, n.d.s,” L217, box 1, Western Association of Writers Collection, Indi-

384 } Notes to Pages 147–150

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 384384 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM ana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana (hereafter cited as WAW Collection). For membership lists of the WAW, see S 3194. 88. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was the unanimous fi rst-place choice, while there was no consensus on places two through four, some arguing for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (of course), Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster, Irving’s Sketch- book, or Bret Harte’s “Stories of the Golden West.” Cooper was rejected from the list because of the “fi ller” used to pad out his narratives. See IPQ 810.6, no. 1, West- ern Association of Writers, “Clippings and Programs,” WAW Collection. 89. Ray Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy: The Western Association of Writers,” http://www.indianahistory.org/heritage/writers.html (accessed 6/18/02). See also James L. Weygand, Winona Holiday: The Story of the Western Association of Writ- ers (Nappanee, Ind.: Private Press of the author, 1948). The Indiana State Library has the Minute Books of the WAW, from 1891–1904; a Scrapbook of Newspaper Clippings [about WAW], compiled by Amos Butler; Invitations, 1886–1904; and Programs and Printed Pieces. See L217, box 1, 1887–1910, WAW Collection. 90. George S. Cottman, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [4–5]. 91. John Clark Ridpath, “Is History Acquainted with Providence?” “Program for the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers, June 28, 29, 30 and July 1 and 2, 1897,” in folder 9, “Programs, 1892–1897, 1902,” L217, WAW Collection. See also “The Western Writers,” Warsaw Daily Times, 2 July 1897, IPQ 810.6 no. 1, Clippings and Programs, in the same collection. 92. George S. Cottman, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [3]. For more on Ridpath’s affi liation with the Western Association of Writers, see Material concerning the Western Association of Writers; programs, 1887–1901; and News Articles about WAW, box 1, folder 7, Cory Family Papers, 1828–1943, Collection # M 0459, BV 2206-2210, BV 2423–2427, OM 0177, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Ind. (hereafter cited as Cory Family Papers). 93. John Clark Ridpath, “Why the Pawpaw Is Poetical and the Turnip Is Not,” described as a “semihumorous, philosophical dissertation,” published in W.A.W. Souvenir no. 2, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Convention of Eagle Lake, Indi- ana, July 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1890, ed. Mary E. Carwill (New Castle, Ind.: Courier, for the Western Association of Writers, 1891), 110–21. 94. For more on Riley’s role in the WAW and Ridpath’s relationship with him in that capacity, see Ridpath to “My Dear and Sky-Blue Riley,” 22 September 1890, Riley MSS. See also Ridpath to Riley, 9 January 1892 and 1 March 1897, in the same collection. 95. Riley and Ridpath wrote frequent “love letters” and poems to each other, Rid- path, for instance, asking Riley: “Why don’t you send me a love letter?” Riley responding: “the ‘climate of your favor’ bears down upon the hothouse of my

Notes to Pages 150–151 { 385

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 385385 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM heart. Why don’t you come home here oftener?” Elsewhere, Riley congratulated Ridpath on his “sonnet to his late co-yodeler [poet], Mr. Dante, who in all truth was a hell of a Poet—though, I doubt not, his perfunctory views on hell seem tame enough to him now.” See Ridpath to Riley, 11 October 1890, 25 October 1893, 1 March 1897, Riley MSS. For a sample of Riley’s responses, see James Whitcomb Riley to John C. Ridpath, 7 September 1897, folder 5, Ridpath Papers, and “Lines to Perfesser James Clark Ridpath,” Riley MSS, “Writings.” 96. Clara Laughlin, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [4]. 97. Ridpath to Riley, Correspondence 3 September 1890–Jan. 1891, box 4, Riley MSS. 98. Ridpath to Riley, Sept 8, 1890, box 4, Riley MSS. 99. Nicholson, The Hoosiers, 158, 167, 171–72. 100. As cited in Nicholson, The Hoosiers, 28, 233. See also Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [2]. 101. Ridpath to Riley, 10 September 1891, Riley MSS. 102. “Lines to Perfessor John Clark Ridpath,” Writings, Greenbox, Riley MSS. For Riley’s annotated comments about the poem, see L235, Tucker W. Taylor Papers, box 2, folder 2, Manuscript Section, Indiana State Library. 103. “The Poet-Historian,” in folder 10: “Miscellaneous poems; Semi-Centennial Reception in honor of JCR, April 27, 1891,” Ridpath Papers; also in John C. Ridpath, microﬁ lm 128, in the same collection. 104. Nora Marks, “Scrapbook, no. 5,” 69, 76, BV 2210, Cory Family Papers. See also “With the Writers: The Western Association of Writers Meeting at Warsaw, July 3, 1897,” Daily Reporter in IPQ 810.6 no. 1, Clippings and Programs, WAW Col- lection, and “The Western Writers,” Warsaw Daily Times, 2 July 1897. 105. For a discussion of Turner’s address, “The Poet of the Future,” see Ernst A. Brei- sach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 100. 106. Sayings and Doings of the Sixth General Meeting Held at Eagle Lake, Warsaw, Ind., July 6 to 10, 1891 (Cincinnati: Jones Publishing for the Western Association of Writers, 1892), 24–25. 107. “Choice Literary Ramblings,” The Pen, folder 11, L217, box I, Miscellaneous Pamphlets, Indiana State Library. Ridpath noted: “I have never been able to understand why it is that the Western Association of Writers was not from the ﬁ rst regarded with prime favor and applause by the public. We may not conceal from ourselves the unpleasant truth that the society was for several years disparaged and held to no reputation.” See Sayings and Doings of the Sixth General Meeting, 31–32. 108. Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [1]. Certain members of the WAW objected to the politicization of the organization. See Cyrus F. McNutt, “The A.A.W.,” 386 } Notes to Pages 151–154

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 386386 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM 14 May 1887, Scrapbook 1, 34, BV 2206, 5 Scrapbooks of Newspaper Clippings about Politics and Writing Kept by the Cory Family Members, Indiana Historical Society. 109. N[oah] J. Clodfelter, The Gotham of Yasmire: A Satire (Buffalo, N.Y.: Peter Paul, 1897), 37, 36, 5, 16, 17, 87, 21, 16–17. 110. Clodfelter, The Gotham of Yasmire, 6, 37. 111. Ridpath to Riley, 27 April 1889, Ridpath Papers. 112. John Clark Ridpath, “Is History a Science?” “Program for the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers to be held at Winona Park (Spring Fountain Park), Warsaw, IN, June 29 and 30, and July 1, 2, and 3, 1896,” Cory Family Papers, box I, folder 7, M0459. For a brief summary of Ridpath’s paper, see The Northern Indianian 41, no. 3 (9 July 1896). 113. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 389. 114. “The Man in History,” “Program of the Eighth Annual Convention (Ninth) Meet- ing of the Western Association of Writers Ridpath,” Cory Family Papers, box 1, folder 7, M0459; reprinted in Ridpath, “The Man in History,” Indiana Histori- cal Society Publications, 281. See also folder 9, Programs, 1892–1897, 1902, L217, box 1, Indiana State Library. 115. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 281. 116. Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The Hague: Mouton, 1959), 19, 21, 20. 117. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 282–83. 118. For a discussion of the etymology of the term “New History,” see Ellen Fitzpat- rick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–6, 10–11, 256. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). For more on Riley’s inﬂ uence on popularizers of history, see Edward L. Tucker, “The Association of Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley: Further Documents,” American Literary Study 26, no. 2 (2000): 223–35. Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye) was a humorist who wrote Bill Nye’s History of the United States (Philadelphia, 1894) and who joined Riley on the lecture circuit in the 1890s. 119. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 397. 120. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 284–86, 272–73. 121. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 393. 122. John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s Universal History, 4 vols. (New York: Hall and Locke, 1893). The work was also published in an eight-volume deluxe edition called The Great Races of Mankind. 123. Ridpath, Ridpath’s Universal History, 1:v–vi. 124. Ibid., 1:vii, 128, vii, 128. Notes to Pages 154–159 { 387

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 387387 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM 125. Ibid., 1:182. 126. Riley to Ridpath, 14 October 1895, Riley MSS. 127. See the poetic tribute to Ridpath’s sweeping tome in James Newton Matthews, “The Great Races of Mankind,” 28 October 1892, in folder 10, Ridpath Papers. 128. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 11–12. 129. For more on this incident of pictorial misappropriation, see Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past, 172–73. 130. John Clark Ridpath, People’s History of the United States (Philadelphia: Histori- cal Publishing, 1895), 19. 131. “Ridpath’s History of the World,” The Frisco Employees’ Magazine, 49. 132. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 470, 183, 179, 377, 178, 33–34. 133. Ibid., 42–45. 134. For references to these paired texts, see A Popular History of the United States, 364, and People’s History of the United States, 265; A Popular History, 61, and People’s History, 62; A Popular History, 78, and People’s History, 70. 135. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 278. 136. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 57; People’s History of the United States, 57. 137. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 315–16. 138. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 483. 139. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 306. 140. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 370. 141. Here Adams is referring to the threat of social science with reference to earlier problems presented “by poets, philosophers, or theologians.” See G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” American Historical Review 14 (1909): 228–30, 235–36, 228–30. 142. Higham, History, 98. 143. Ephraim Emerton’s comments from Charles H. Haskins, “Report of the Pro- ceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the AHA,” Annual Report of the AHA for the Year 1903, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904), 8, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 90. The second Emerton quote is cited in Higham, History, 98. 144. Higham, History, 99, 98. 145. Breisach, Historiography, 310. 146. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature, 572–73. 147. Carson, “John C. Ridpath,” 599. See, for instance, Wayne Guthrie, “ ‘Old Reddy’ Is a DePauw Tradition,” folder 10, Ridpath Papers. Guthrie credits the People’s History with “giving a homespun insight into and understanding of history.” 148. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 71. 149. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 83–387; 391. 388 } Notes to Pages 159–166

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 388388 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0412:59:04 PMPM 150. Carl Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” Western Political Quarterly 7 (Sept. 1955): 327–40. 151. Harry Ritter, quoted in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 47. 152. William Cronon, cited in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Society, 51. 153. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Society, 73, 40. 154. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 459, 494–95, 482, 509, 551. 155. Breisach, Historiography, 271. 156. Charles Beard, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 254. 157. Breisach, Historiography, 294. 158. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 632. 159. Ibid., 557–58. 160. John Clark Ridpath, “The Best Methods of Preserving Local History,” excerpted in in “Literary Symposium: The Third Gathering of the American Association of Writers in this City,” an unattributed newsclipping pasted in Scrapbook 5, [p. 22], BV 2210, Cory Family Papers. 161. Higham, History, 54. 162. “Perhaps a stronger presentation of the money question was never made than that which comes from the pen of John Clark Ridpath, the great historian,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution. “Mr Ridpath makes a declaration in words so clear as to be at once understood by the most simple mind.” See “A Strong Presentation,” Atlanta Constitution, 12 June 1896, 4, and “Ridpath on Silver,” Atlanta Constitution, 6 Au- gust 1896, 3. The Chicago Daily Tribune was far more critical of Ridpath’s bi-metal positions. See “A Fool Challenge,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 June 1896, 14. 163. For more on Ridpath and his acceptance of the Arena editorship, see Frank Lu- ther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1957), 412–13. 164. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850– 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 202–3. 165. “Table of Contents,” The Arena 18 (September 1897). 166. Ridpath to Riley, 1 March 1897, Riley MSS. 167. W. T. Stead, “The Arena,” in Review of Reviews 4 (July 1891): 51–52. 168. Shi, Facing Facts, 202–3. 169. Breisach, Historiography, 277. 170. John Clark Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” The Arena 18 (September 1897): 407–8. 171. Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” 410–11. See also Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 509. 172. Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” 418. 173. John Clark Ridpath, “Prosperity: The Sham and the Reality,” The Arena 18 (Oc- tober 1897): 487–88, 493. Notes to Pages 166–173 { 389

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 389389 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 174. “One Flag, One Cause, One Country,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 September 1898, 6. See also “Ceases Publication: October Number of The Arena Will Not Be Issued,” Boston Daily Globe, 24 September 1898, 2. 175. “Ridpath for the People,” Atlanta Constitution, 11 June 1896, 1. 176. Eugene Fitch Ware to James Whitcomb Riley, 15 April 1899, Riley MSS. 177. George H. Lepper to George W. Julian, 19 February 1898, L-81, George W. Julian Papers, Indiana State Library. 178. John Clark Ridpath, “[The Gold-Standard Conspiracy],” The Arena 19 ( June 1898): 840. 179. John Clark Ridpath, “Our Best Literature, Is it Read?” 7, 11–12, box 1, folder 2, Ridpath Papers. See also Ridpath, “Literature: The Historic View,” in “Tenth Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers, July 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, 1895,” folder 9, L217, WAW Collection. 180. For more on Progressive Historians, see Breisach, American Progressive History, esp. 14–20. 181. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 5. 182. Chauncey Wright, “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer,” and “Evolution by Natural Selection,” in Philosophical Discussions (New York, 1877), 49, 196, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 36. 183. Larned, The Literature of American History, iv. 184. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” 235, 225, 224. 185. Ibid., 230. 186. For more on the work of Adams and others on such special committees of the American Historical Association, see “Queries as to a Cooperative History of the United States under the Auspices of the American Historical Association,” in Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901: As Revealed in the Corre- spondence of Herbert Baxter Adams, ed. W. Stull Holt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), 282–86. 187. For more on the campaigns by professionals to inﬂ uence school histories, see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conﬂ icts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 175–218. 188. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” 229, 222, 236, 223. 189. Annales Internationales d’Historie, Congres de Paris 1900, Premiere Section, Histoire Generale et Diplomatique (Paris 1901), 5–6, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 37–38. 190. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 379–82. 191. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 430–33, 278.

390 } Notes to Pages 173–177

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 390390 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 192. “Rev. Hilary A. Gobin, President of DePauw University,” IF*810.6 W527m, vol. 1, Western Association of Writers, Minute Books, 1891–1904, [p. 8], WAW Collection. 193. “Frank Stanton Writes of John Ridpath, the Noted Historian, Who Died Tues- day,” Atlanta Constitution, 2 August 1900, 3. For more on Stanton and his relationship to members of the WAW, see Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [6]. See also “Last Work of Ridpath Tells of All Races of Mankind Since First Evidences of Civilization,” Atlanta Constitution, 15 April 1917, 10K, and “John Ridpath Died Last Night: He Was America’s Foremost Living Historian,” At- lanta Constitution, 1 August 1900, 3. 194. Dr. Albert Shaw, “John C. Ridpath,” 1 August 1900, cited in Phillips, “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3. 195. Poem Composed by James Whitcomb Riley, in Memorial Services of JCR, account from DePauw Palladium (28 January 1901), folder 11, DePauw University Archives. For a prose tribute by Riley see “John Clark Ridpath,” Indianapolis Sun, 1 August 1900. 196. See “Death of John C. Ridpath: Historian Passes Away After a Long Illness in the Presbyterian Hospital,” New York Times, 1 August 1900, and “Maker of Books: John Clark Ridpath Dies in New York,” Boston Daily Globe, 1 August 1900, 8. 197. Albert J. Beveridge to Worthington Ford, 19 January 1916, The Papers of Albert J. Beveridge, General Correspondence, 1890–1927, ﬁ le M, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. For more on Beveridge as historian, see Claude Bowers, Bev- eridge and the Progressive Era (New York: The Literary Guild, 1932). 198. John Scott Wilson, “Popular History and Biography,” The Handbook of Ameri- can Popular Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 201–2. See also Milton Berman, John Fiske, the Evolution of a Popu- larizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).

Chapter 4. “The Past Everything” 1. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850– 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 275. 2. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 37. 3. Shi, Facing Facts, 275. 4. Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Moderniza- tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 84. 5. James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern His- torical Outlook (New York: The Free Press, 1965 [1912]), 38. 6. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 211.

Notes to Pages 177–181 { 391

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 391391 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 7. Breisach, American Progressive History, 15. 8. David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 9. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 210, cited in Berk- hofer, Beyond the Great Story, 48. 10. See Henry Adams, A Letter to American Teachers of History (Baltimore: privately printed, J. H. Hurst, 1910) and “The Tendency of History,” American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1894 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1895). 11. Earle W. Dow, “Features of the New History: Apropos of Lamprecht’s ‘Deutsche Geschichte,’ ” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 441. 12. Breisach, American Progressive History, 55. 13. For more on the defi nition of “New History,” see Harry Elmer Barnes, The New History and the Social Studies (New York: Appleton-Century, 1925). See also Ed- ward Eggleston, “How a ‘New’ History Was Made,” The Critic 15 (August 17, 1899): 80 14. Robinson, The New History, 45, 134, 19. 15. For background information on Robinson, see Luther V. Hendricks, James Har- vey Robinson: Teacher of History (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946); Crane Brinton, “James Harvey Robinson,” in Dictionary of American Biography, supp. 2, part 2, ed. Robert Livingston Schuyler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 562–66; and Harry Elmer Barnes, “James Harvey Robinson,” in American Masters of Social Science, ed. Howard Odum (New York: Holt, 1927), 321–408. 16. James Harvey Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (Bos- ton: Ginn, 1902), preface. 17. Robinson, The New History, 1. 18. Breisach, American Progressive History, 15, 33, 35, 74. On Turner, see “The Sig- nifi cance of History,” (1891) in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Pres- ent, ed. Fritz Stern (New York: Random House, 1956), 198–208. See also Karl Lamprecht, “Historical Development and Present Character of the Science of History,” in Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. Howard J. Rogers (Boston, 1906), 2:149. “Social history” is a designation that has undergone many iterations throughout the last century. For a discussion of its many uses among historians, see Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in The New American History, edited for the American Historical Association by Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1900), 163–84. 19. Robinson, The New History, 75. 20. Shi, Facing Facts, 77. 21. Robinson, The New History, 137. 22. Shi, Facing Facts, 77. 392 } Notes to Pages 181–184

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 392392 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 23. Robert Allen Skotheim, ed., The Historian and the Climate of Opinion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969). 24. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reap- praisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 97. 25. See Theodore Zeldin, “Social History and Total History,” Journal of Social His- tory 10, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 242–43, summarized in Himmelfarb, The New His- tory and the Old, 123. 26. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Random House, 1994), 133. 27. Shi, Facing Facts, 118–19. 28. Robinson, The New History, 69. 29. Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (Sep- tember 1890): 291. 30. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 29. 31. William Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” in American Realists and Naturalists, ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, vol. 12 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), 166. 32. William Randel, Edward Eggleston (New York, Twayne, 1963), 35. For further biographical information, see “Edward Eggleston: An Interview,” The Outlook 55 (6 February 1897): 431–37. 33. Edward Eggleston, “Private Diary,” 4 February 1855, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 34. 34. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 27. 35. Edward Eggleston, “Formative Inﬂ uences,” The Forum 10 (November 1890): 279–90, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 30. Also see “Autobiographical Article,” #110B, box 15–16, folder 5, Edward Eggleston Papers, Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (hereafter cited as Eggleston Papers). 36. For more on the relationship between Edward Eggleston and his brother George, see George Cary Eggleston, The First of Hoosiers: Reminiscences of Edward Egg- leston (Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1903). For details regarding Edward Egg- leston’s health, which was fragile most of his life, see “A Careful Examination,” #110B, box 15–16, folder 6, Eggleston Papers. 37. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 31. See also “Writers Who Lack College Training,” The Critic 9 (11 December 1886): 296–97. 38. For more on Eggleston’s career as a minister see “Sermons,” #110D, Eggleston Papers. 39. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 64, 63. See Capt. George B. Herbert, The Popular History of the Civil War in America, 1861–1865 (New York: F. M. Lupton, 1884). Notes to Pages 185–188 { 393

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 393393 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 40. For more on The Independent, see Frank L. Mott, A History of American Maga- zines, 1850–1865, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938– 1968): 3:367–79, and William Hayes Ward, “Sixty Years of The Independent,” in The Independent 65 (10 December 1908): 1345–51. 41. Shi, Facing Facts, 83. 42. “Edward Eggleston: An Interview.” 43. For more on this period of Eggleston’s life as a fi ction writer, see Edward Stone, Voices of Despair: Four Motifs in American Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 137–78. 44. Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmil- lan, 1957), 870. 45. Clarence Gohdes, “Exploitation of the Provinces,” in The Literature of the American People: An Historical and Critical Survey, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 647. See Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Master. A Novel (New York: Orange Judd, 1871) and The Mys- tery of Metropolisville (New York: Orange Judd, 1873). For information on the production history of these novels, including manuscript drafts with corrections and revisions, see “Manuscript (Book and Article),” Eggleston Papers, #110B, The Hoosier Schoolmatser, box 1–2, and The Mystery of Metropolisville, box 11–12. 46. Eggleston was also subject to periods of high sentimentality in which he produced portraits of caricatured fi gures and plots without much grounding in reality. Hoosier School-Master was not a work of uncompromising realism, for instance. “Perhaps because of the example set by romantic fi ctionists,” Walter Blair has noted, or “because of the nostalgia which most writers felt for the past,” local colorists tended “to write not of the scene of the day but of a day that was ended.” For writers such as Eggleston, the “mists of time blurred the mirrors somewhat,” and allowed him to “avoid the sordid and the tragic in favor of geniality, sentiment, and pathos.” See Walter Blair et al., The Literature of the United States: An Anthology and a History (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1957), 746. 47. Edward Eggleston, “Books That Have Helped Me,” The Forum 3 (August 1887): 584. 48. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 168–69. 49. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 91–97. 50. “Notes of an Executive Committee Meeting of the WAW, 26 December 1901,” IF*810.6 W527m, Western Association of Writers, Minute Books, 1891–1904, WAW Collection. 51. George Cary Eggleston to William H. Ridering, 27 November 1886, Edward Egg- leston Letters, S 410, folder 1, 1868–1902, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana. 394 } Notes to Pages 188–190

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 394394 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0512:59:05 PMPM 52. Blair et al., The Literature of the United States, 746. 53. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 172. 54. Blair et al., The Literature of the United States, 749. 55. See for instance, Eggleston, “Books That Have Helped Me,” 578–86. 56. Edward Eggleston to Mr. Sanborn, 5 September 1872, MS. #7187: Papers of Ed- ward Eggleston, University of Virginia Special Collections, Charlottesville, Va. 57. “Plan of Study,” 30 April 1860, MS. Journal, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 125, 59. 58. Spiller, ed., Literary History of the United States, 870. 59. Edward Eggleston, “The New History,” American Historical Association An- nual Report, I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1900), 46–47. “Honors were heaped on George Bancroft” in 1891 when he fi nished his monumental History, “but scorn on his historical work. Once the latter had taught reverence for the American past, elucidated the Manifest Destiny, and assured the nation that it was the instrument of Divine Providence for bringing liberty and democracy to all of humanity. Now Bancroft’s books . . . were considered ‘mere’ literature, lacking the reliable access to past reality that only a properly scientifi c method offered.” Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History, 17. 60. “Edward Eggleston: An Interview,” cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 137. 61. Eggleston to Brother George, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers. 62. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 30 March 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, folder 25, paraphrased in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 129. 63. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 30 March 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, folder 25, paraphrased in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 129. McMaster was a professor in the history department at the University of Pennsyl- vania. See John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (8 vols., 1883–1913). 64. Eggleston to Lillie, June 1880, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers. See Lillie’s responses in folder 22 (1880) #110A. Lillie’s full married name was Elizabeth (Mrs. Elwin Seelye). 65. Eggleston, “The New History,” 38–40. For more on this rejection of political and military history in this period, see William A. Dunning, “A Generation of American Historiography,” in Truth in History and Other Essays by William A. Dunning, with an introduction by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1965, [1937]): 159. 66. James Harvey Robinson, “Popular Histories, Their Defects and their Possibili- ties,” International Monthly, July 1900, 55. 67. Eggleston, “The New History,” 43–46; J[ohn] R[ichard] Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Crown, 1875). Notes to Pages 190–194 { 395

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 395395 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 68. See letters from Europe 1885–86, in #110H 3 (1884–1888), folders XVIII–XIX in Eggleston Papers. See also an account of this trip in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “Introduction,” in The Transit of Civilization: From England to America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1959), xiii. 69. For detailed notes on Eggleston’s ﬁ nancial status throughout his career, see “Property and Investments” and “Household Accounts,” in #110K, Eggleston Papers. 70. See “Letters from Owl’s Nest,” Eggleston Papers, #110G, folder V (1883–84), Eggleston Papers. 71. Eggleston to Lillie, 1885–1886, #110A, folder 29 (1884–1888), folders XVIII–XIX, Eggleston Papers. 72. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 5 July 1880, #110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers. 73. D. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, 4 June 1890; W. W. Appleton to Dr. Eggleston, 6 November 1890; and Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers. 74. John H. Vincent to Edward Eggleston, 20 September 1890, “Incoming and Out- going Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers. 75. Eggleston to John H. Vincent, [1890], “Incoming and Outgoing Correspon- dence,” #110A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers. 76. Eggleston to “Dear Wife,” 12 October 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, folder 25, Eggleston Papers. 77. “Circulars, Announcements, Etc.,” #110F, folder 2, Eggleston Papers. 78. Edward Eggleston, The Household History of the United States and Its People (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), v, iii–iv. 79. Eggleston The Household History, iv, viii, iv–v. 80. See Edward Eggleston, A History of the United States and Its People, For the Use of Schools (New York: American Book, 1888), iv–v. See also Eggleston to William Appleton, 15 February 1890, #110A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers. 81. Eggleston, The Household History, 25, 77–78, 93, 232, 244. 82. “Some Women in the Indian Wars,” in “School Book Material,” #110B, boxes 7–8, 9–10, folder II, Eggleston Papers. 83. “Edward Eggleston,” The Literary News 22, no. 2 (February 1901): 42. 84. This discussion borrows from Thomas Bender’s critique of Linda Gordon; see Thomas Bender, “Review Essay: Strategies of Narrative Synthesis,” American Historical Review, February 2002, 145. The Linda Gordon book being reviewed is The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 85. Eggleston, The Household History, 353, 292. 86. Bender, “Review Essay,” 145. 87. Eggleston, The Household History, 212. 396 } Notes to Pages 194–199

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 396396 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 88. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 130. 89. “Eggleston’s United States History,” The Literary News 9, no. 10 (October 1888): 302. 90. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 100. 91. Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, #110A, Personal Letters, folder 33, Eggleston Papers. 92. Eggleston, Household History, v–vi. 93. For more on Remington as illustrator, see Melissa J. Webster, “Frederic Reming- ton,” in American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, ed. Steven E. Smith, Catherine A. Hastedt and Donald H. Dya, vol. 188 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998), 286–98. Original copies of several illustrations in Eggleston’s volume can be found at the Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, N.Y. 94. Peggy and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), 121–22, 78–79. 95. “Incorrect School Books,” Florida Times-Union, 21 October 1893, in box I, Pub- lications and Accounts, Eggleston Papers. For a discussion of the illustrations in Eggelston’s book, see Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian In- stitution Press, 2002), 178–79. 96. C. F. Tucker Brooke, Dial, 51, cited in Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in New Directions in American Intellectual His- tory, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 203. 97. “Eggleston’s United States History,” The Literary News, 302. 98. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 131–33. 99. W. W. Appleton to Dr. Eggleston, 6 November 1890, “Incoming and Outgoing Corrrespondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers. 100. Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, #110 A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers. 101. “The Owl’s Nest Family Book,” October 1889, cited in Randel, Edward Egg- leston, 134. 102. The best selling of these biographies was Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, The Story of Columbus, ed. Dr. Edward Eggleston (D. Appleton, 1892). For details of the contract, see Russell Hinman to Lillie Eggleston, 20 March 1895, #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 103. Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans (American Book, 1895). For details concerning the ﬁ nal form and content of this work, see correspondence (4 pieces) from the American Book Company in folder 1, #110B, box 9–10, Egg- leston Papers. Notes to Pages 199–203 { 397

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 397397 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 104. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publica- tions and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 105. W. W. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publica- tions and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 106. Russell Hinman to Lillie Eggleston, 20 March 1895, #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 107. D. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, 7 September 1893, #110I, folder XII, Publica- tions and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 108. Eva Remington to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], box I—Publications and Book Ac- counts, Eggleston Papers. 109. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 14 November 1894, box I—Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 110. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 10 January 1895, box I—Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 111. Bryan, Taylor & Co. to Edward Eggleston, 12 October 1893, #110I, folder XII, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 112. W. W. Eggleston to Dr. Eggleston, 6 November 1890, #110A, folder 33, Publica- tions and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 113. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 128–29. Difﬁ culties in negotiating a contract with Ap- pleton’s for the series also slowed the progress. In 1889 Appleton’s proposed a two-volume work to be published in two years, in time for the quadri-centennial, but Eggleston had a much bigger project in mind. “At present I will only remark that a two-volume history of the United States of 800,000 words would neither be creditable to me nor to you if written in two years even with the advantages I have to begin with,” Eggleston wrote. See Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 Febru- ary 1890, #110A, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 114. Eggleston to Lillie, Jan 1881, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers. 115. Edward Eggleston “Preface,” The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), viii. 116. Eggleston had published partial installments of the history in The Century Il- lustrated Monthly Magazine throughout the 1880s, beginning with vol. 26, n.s. vol. 3 (November 1882–April 1883): 61–83. Also see the galley for portions of The Beginners of a Nation with revisions in #110B, box 13–14, Eggleston Papers. 117. Crane Brinton, “The ‘New History’ and ‘Past Everything,’ ” American Scholar 8 (1939): 144–57. 118. Breisach, American Progressive History, 48. 119. Shi, Facing Facts, 108. The De Forest quote cited in Shi comes from James W. De Forest, “The Great American Novel,” Nation, 9 January 1868, 27–29. 398 } Notes to Pages 204–207

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 398398 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 120. Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe, 233. 121. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 40. 122. Shi, Facing Facts, 271, 149–50. 123. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 55. 124. Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” 290. 125. William P. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” The Forum 22 (1896– 97): 590–92. 126. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, vii–viii. 127. Ibid., vii. 128. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 592. 129. The Brooklyn Citizen, 13 December 1896, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 140. The “certain dread” portion of the quote is from Randel’s synopsis of the review. 130. The Independent 44 (21 January 1897), cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 141. 131. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 592, 595–97. 132. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 200–201. 133. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old History, 18–19, 20–21. 134. [Review of The Beginners of a Nation] in the Brooklyn Eagle, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 139–40. 135. J. N. Larned, ed., The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, for the American Library Association, 1902), 70. 136. Randel, Edward Eggleston, p. 137. See also “Notices for Beginners of a Nation,” (1896–97), #110E, “Papers and Clippings,” box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers. 137. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 189–90, 245, 73–74, 76. 138. Herbert L. Osgood, [review of] “The Beginners of a Nation,” American Histori- cal Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (April 1897): 530. 139. [Review of Beginners of a Nation] from Harrisburg Patriot, in #110E, box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers. 140. Reuben Briggs Davenport, [Review of The Beginners of a Nation], York Commer- cial Advertiser, 20 February 1897, box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers. 141. G[eorge] C[ary] E[ggleston], “Historians and Our Aristocrats,” undated, unattributed newspaper review in box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers. 142. For more on George Louis Beer and his contributions to colonial historiography in relation to Eggleston, see Bert James Loewenberg, American History in American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 438–40. 143. Rochester Post-Express, 2 January 1897, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 141. 144. John H. Vincent to Edward Eggleston, 20 September 1890, “Incoming and Out- going Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers. Notes to Pages 208–213 { 399

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 399399 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 145. For more on this anti-pictorial campaign conducted by the American Historical Association, see Pfi tzer, Picturing the Past, 180–85. 146. J[ulian] H[awthorne], “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civiliza- tion from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,” in Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 147. M. J. K., “The Beginners of a Nation,” American Hebrew, 12 March 1897, #110E, Papers and Clippings, Eggleston Papers. 148. [Review of Beginners of a Nation], Los Angeles Herald, #110E, Papers and Clip- pings, Eggleston Papers. 149. Edward Eggleston, “An Interview,” The Outlook 55 (February 6, 1897), cited in Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 185n. 150. Eggleston to Wilkinson, 2 January 1888, MSS 7187: Papers of Edward Eggleston, University of Virginia Special Collections, Charlottesville. 151. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 142. 152. Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Proceedings, Second Annual Meeting, Sara- toga, September 8–10, 1885,” in Papers of the American Historical Association I, no. 6 (Washington, D.C., 1886): 33–34. 153. Herbert L. Osgood, [review of] “The Beginners of a Nation,” 528–30. 154. Current Literature (May 1897), #110: E, Eggleston Papers. 155. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 171. For more on Eggleston’s election to the presidency of the AHA, see Annual Report of the American Studies Association for the Year 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1901). With regard to Eggleston’s work on behalf of the AHA, see “The Annual Meeting of the Ameri- can Historical Association,” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 416. See also J. F. Jameson, “The American Historical Association, 1884–1909,” American Historical Review 15 (October 1909): 11. 156. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 49. 157. Edward Eggleston, “The New History,” American Historical Association Annual Report, I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1900): 35–47. 158. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 171. 159. American Historical Association, The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven (New York: Macmil- lan, 1900). For more on the Committee of Seven, see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Confl icts Over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Pres- ent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 160. Eggleston, “The New History,” 41–42; 47. 161. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 42–43. 400 } Notes to Pages 214–216

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 400400 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0612:59:06 PMPM 162. Eggleston, “The New History,” 47. 163. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 42–43. 164. Paul Leicester Ford, [“Review of The Beginners of a Nation”], London Daily Chronicle, #110E, Papers and Clippings, Eggleston Papers. 165. Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1886–1889). See also Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narra- tive,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (1890): 296. On other so-called co-operative histories, see Michael Kraus, A History of American History (New York: Farrar and Rine- hart, 1937), 573–96. 166. Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” 297. 167. Messenger, 1 April 1897, box E, #110, Eggleston Papers. 168. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 598–99. 169. Nelson A. Crawford, “American University Presses,” American Mercury 18 (1929): 210–14. 170. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 33. 171. Albert Bushnell Hart, “The Historical Opportunity in America,” American His- torical Review 4, no. 1 (October 1898): 12–13. 172. Schlesinger, “Introduction,” The Transit of Civilization, vii. 173. Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 665. 174. Eggleston to C. W. Bower, 2 January 1889, American Historical Association Papers, series A, box 4, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 175. For a further discussion of this struggle between amateurs and university scholars within the AHA, see David D. Van Tassel, “From Learned Society to Profes- sional Organization,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 954. 176. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 130. 177. William M. Sloane, “History and Democracy,” American Historical Review 1 (October 1895–July 1896): 8. 178. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 55. 179. George Burton Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” American His- torical Review 14, no. 2 (January 1909): 221, 224–27, 229–30. 180. Robinson took issue with G. B. Adams on these matters. “It is the aim of the present essay to put the whole situation in a different light from that in which Professor Adams presents it.” Robinson, The New History, 82n. 181. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” American Historical Re- view 14, no. 2 (January 1909): 224–25. 182. Breisach, American Progressive History, 60. 183. Ibid., 76. Breisach uses this phrase in connection with his discussion of Robin- son’s colleague at Columbia, Charles Beard. Notes to Pages 216–221 { 401

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 401401 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM 184. For more on Eggleston’s efforts on behalf of the Copyright Law, see Eggleston, “Anglo-American Copyright,” The North American Review 146 ( January 1888): 78–79, and “Why the Copyright Bill Should Pass,” American Copyright League (1890). Also see “To the American Copyright League,” and “3 Articles on Copy- right” in #110B, boxes 15–16, folder 5, 9, as well as “Personal Letters to Egg- leston,” #110G:5, folders XXXVI–XLIII, Eggleston Papers. 185. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 21 February 1888 and 29 April 1888, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 31, Eggleston Papers. 186. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 7 January 1888, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, folder 31, Eggleston Papers. 187. Edward Eggleston, The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York (New York: D. Apple- ton, 1891). For more on this episode, see Randel, Edward Eggleston, 157–58. 188. For more on the themes and reception of The Faith Doctor, see Berthoff, The Fer- ment of Realism, 92–93. See also “Notes and comments concerning some of his published works,” in Two Notebooks, #110B, box 17, folder 3, Eggleston Papers. 189. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 147. 190. “Current Literature,” Messenger, March 1897, #110E, Eggleston Papers. 191. George Burton Adams attacked Eggleston’s New History directly in his presidential address to the American Historical Association. Eggleston anticipated historians like James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard who called for a sub- ordination of the past to the present and who argued for a progressive, public service component to historical study. See Higham, History, 107, 111. 192. For more on Eggleston’s campaign against the war with Spain, see Randel, Ed- ward Eggleston, 145–47. 193. Andrew S. Rogers, “Review of Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War,” http://www.amazon.com (accessed June 27, 2005). 194. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 17 April 1898, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre- spondence,” #110A, folder 52, Eggleston Papers. 195. Edward Eggleston, First Book in American History (New York: American Book, 1899). 196. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 10 July 1900, in #110I, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 197. Henry Vail to Edward Eggleston, 13 Januray 1899, #110I, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers. 198. “Edward Eggleston,” The Literary News 22, no. 2 (February 1901): 42. 199. Eggleston to Lillie, March 1894, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 43, Eggleston Papers. 200. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 9 January 1899, #110A, folder 55 in “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 43, Eggleston Papers. 402 } Notes to Pages 221–224

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 402402 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM 201. Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism, 189–90. 202. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 40–41. 203. Schlesinger, “Introduction to The Transit of Civilization,” xvii. 204. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 41. 205. Barrett Wendell, [Review of The Transit of Civilization], American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1901): 802. 206. Charles M. Andrews, [Review of The Transit of Civilization], Political Science Quarterly 17 (March 1902): 802–5. 207. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth About History, 199. 208. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 21. 209. Appleby et al, Telling the Truth About History, 200. 210. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, viii. 211. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 8.

Chapter 5. “A Background of Real History” 1. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in The New American History, edited for the American Historical Association by Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versity Press, 1900), 164, 169. 2. Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History Workshop 7 (Spring 1979): 66–94, cited in Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” 164. 3. Acts of Florida, 1889, ch. 3872, sec. 31, p. 82, cited in Bessie Louise Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History in the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 17. 4. Crane Brinton, “The New History, Twenty-Five Years After,” Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 134–47. 5. James Harvey Robinson, “The New History,” in The New History: Essays Illus- trating the Modern Historical Outlook (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 10. 6. “Biographical and Historical Note,” 2, Manuscript Collection # 354, “Beadle and Adams Archives, 1848–1920,” Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware (hereafter cited as Beadle and Adams Archives). 7. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 202–5. 8. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967 [1883]), 20. 9. J. N. Makris, Boston Murders (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1948), 8–9, cited in Albert Stone Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagina- tion (North Haven, Conn.: Archon, 1970), 101. See also Comstock, Traps for the Young, 37. 10. William Graham Sumner, “What Our Boys Are Reading,” Scribner’s Monthly (March 1878), cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, 103–4. For more on the context Notes to Pages 224–230 { 403

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 403403 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM for this discussion, see Gregory M. Pfi tzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in Camelot: The Infl uence of Dime-Novel Sensationalism on Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 27, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 44. 11. Horace Elisha Scudder, Childhood in Literature and Art (1895), cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, 105–8. 12. Comstock, Traps for the Young, 32–33. For more on Comstock and his role in the campaign against dime novels, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 50–52. 13. Comstock, Traps for the Young, jacket fl ap, 21. 14. Little is known of Ellis’s childhood, but his Tales Told Out of School is thought to be autobiographical and suggests, according to one biographer, a “normal, healthy and mischievous boyhood.” Edward S. Ellis, Tales Told Out of School (Syracuse, N.Y.: C. W. Bardeen, 1899). See also Denis R. Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” Dime Novel Roundup 54 (October 1985): 74–76. 15. Denis Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 74. Ellis’s invention is patent #122,587, Class 36/62 (9 January 1872), “Improvement in Boot-Clamps for Base- ball Players, Edward S. Ellis of Trenton, New Jersey, U.S. Patent and Trademark Offi ce.” 16. Edward S. Ellis, lyricist and composer, “De Louisiana Canebrakes: Negro Song and Chorus,” Sheet Music Collection, box A, John Hay Library, Brown Univer- sity Library, Providence, Rhode Island. 17. Edward S. Ellis, “The Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to Spain” (1898), The Historical American Sheet Music Collection, Music A-6687, Rare Book, Manu- script, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 18. “Lost Classics,” http://www.lcbcbooks.com/bios/ellis.htm (accessed 3/15/05). 19. Edward S. Ellis, Health, Wealth, and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent and Child; to Man and Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor (Philadel- phia: Historical Publishing, 1892), 701–3. 20. “News,” Mercer County Community College Newsletter,” April 12, 1970, 2, “Hon- orary Degree File—Edward S. Ellis,” box 6, Honorary Degree Index, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. 21. Edward S. Ellis, Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1978; reprint of the 1860 edition, which was issued as no. 8 of Beadle’s dime novels [New York: Beadle, 1860]), vol. 77 of The Garland Library of Narratives of North American Indian Captivities, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn. For sales fi gures, see “Queries and Answers from Readers,” New York Times, 12 November 1910, BR12, in which the author recounts the following exchange: “Some years after its publication Ellis asked the elder Beadle how many copies of [Seth Jones] had been sold, and the answer was ‘about 400,000,’ exclusive of the copies sold and printed in Europe.” 404 } Notes to Pages 230–231

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 404404 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM Others have estimated as many as “600,000 copies in half a dozen languages.” See Kenneth W. Scott, “Letters to the Editor,” New York Times, 8 May 1949, BR16. 22. For more on Beadle, see Frank Luther Mott, “The Beadles and Their Novels,” Palimpsest 30 (1949): 173–89. For more on Ellis and the dime-novel tradition, see Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 74–76. See also Charles M. Harvey, “The Dime Novel in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly 100 (July 1907): 37–45. 23. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 201. 24. Paul Eugene Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” in American Writers for Children Before 1900, vol. 42 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985), 166. 25. Ellis, Seth Jones, 35, 36, 46, 21, 43, 67–68. 26. Edward S. Ellis, The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1865; 1882 half-dime edition). Although fi rst published in the late 1860s, the work did not become nationally popular until mass-produced in the tens of thousands by Beadle and Adams in the “half-dime” edition of 1882 cited here. For more on this text, see Pfi tzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in Camelot,” 44. 27. Not coincidentally, it has been argued that Ellis’s dime novel served as an inspiration for time travel literature such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which also violated strict chronology as a way of underscoring the relationship of the past to the present. When Twain’s hero, the disoriented nineteenth-century factory worker Hank Morgan, wakes up in sixth-century Ar- thurian England, the only vocabulary he has available to him for the description of the unusual and bizarre world he has entered is the dime novel lexicon of Ellis’s American West. As T. Jackson Lears and others have noted, Twain was “anti-modernist” in philosophical outlook and was therefore obsessed with the medieval world as a setting for literary speculations about human development. The Middle Ages served as a historical point of reference, a lodestone for consideration by disenchanted Victorians of “where it had all gone wrong.” For Twain, as for the wizard Merlin, traveling backward in time helped clarify America’s place on the historical continuum; it highlighted the causal relations between a “golden” past and a jaded present. Signifi cantly, both novels end badly, with the violent destruction of the technologies that have propelled their protagonists into unlikely temporal settings. While such spectacular endings helped sell many copies of their respective novels for Twain and Ellis, the moral inadequacies of Ellis’s Johnny Brainerd and Twain’s Hank Morgan suggested the potential dangers of transposing fi gures out of their contemporary contexts. For more on the relationship between Ellis’s The Huge Hunter and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, see Pfi tzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages,” esp. 50–57. 28. Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” 168. Notes to Pages 231–233 { 405

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 405405 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM 29. Ellis’s use of a nom de plume resulted in a New York Supreme Court case in which Ellis brought a suit against a publisher, Hurst & Co., for issuing two novels under his real name without permission. “As the books were unprotected by any valid copyright no question was raised as to the right of Hurst & Co. to issue them, but the injunction was sought under the civil rights law . . . against the use of Mr. Ellis’s own name.” The injunction sought by Ellis was denied. See “Publishers May Use Author’s True Name,” New York Times, 25 December 1910, 3. 30. For more on Ellis’s productivity, see Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” 161–72. His obituary in the New York Times records: “He wrote so many books that he often said he had forgotten the number of them.” New York Times, Obit., June 22, 1916. 31. On Ellis’s pen names, see Denis R. Rogers, Dime Novel Round Up 266 (Novem- ber 1954), 267 (December 1954), 268 (January 1955), 315 (December 1958), 307 (April 1958), 318 (March 1958), 318 (March 1959). 319 (April 1959), 320 (May 1959), 330 (March 1960), 334 (July 1960), and 336 (September 1960). See also Gustav Davidson, “Little Known Pseudonyms of 19th Century American Au- thors,” Publisher’s Weekly, 15 June 1940, 292–95. 32. Edward S. Ellis, The Boy Patriot: A Story of Jack the Young Friend of Washington (New York: A. L. Burt, 1900); The Three Arrows, Alamo Series No. 2 (Philadel- phia: John C. Winston, 1904); Trailing Geronimo; or, Campaigning with Crook (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1908). 33. Edward S. Ellis, An American King: A Story of King Philip’s War (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1903); Edward S. Ellis, The Cromwell of Virginia: A Tale of Bacon’s Rebellion (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1904); Edward S. Ellis, Scouts and Comrades; or, Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees: A Tale of the War of 1812 (London: Cassell, 1898). Ellis even lived long enough to write a series of books about aviation; see Edward S. Ellis, The Flying Boys in the Sky, Flying Boys Series No. 1 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1911); The Dragon of the Skies (London: Cassell, 1915). For more on these and other detective series, see Denis R. Rogers, “The Detective Stories of Edward S. Ellis,” Dime Novel Roundup 51 (December 1982): 94–101, and 52 (February 1983): 2–24. 34. [Albert Johannsen], “Ellis, Edward Sylvester,” http://www.niulib.niu.edu/ badnp/ellis edward.html (accessed 5/31/05). 35. For a list of those sources generally agreed upon as having been written by Ellis, see “Edward S. Ellis,” http://www.buriedantiques.com. (accessed 9/6/04). 36. Don Russell, “How I Got This Way,” Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 3 (July 1973): 254. 37. “Current Notes,” New York Times, 7 August 1897, 6. 38. Erastus Beadle to William Benson, [draft], folder 3, Delaware Archives, p. 6; original Series II, Beadle and Adams Archives. 406 } Notes to Pages 233–234

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 406406 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0712:59:07 PMPM 39. “Instructions for Prospective Writers,” in Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 1:4–5. I am grateful to my Skidmore College colleague Mason Stokes for this source. 40. Edward S. Ellis to Orville J. Victor, 13 April 1897, Series II, “Tribute Letters to Orville J. Victor, 1897,” box I, folder 7, MS #354 Beadle and Adams Archives. On Victor as a popular historian, see Gregory M. Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past: Illus- trated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 106, 113, 115. 41. L. P. M. [Levi Parsons Morton?], “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” in Edward S. Ellis, Pop- ular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to Present Time: Including Complete Triumphs of the 19th Century (Chicago: George Spiel, 1900), vii–viii. 42. See “New Publications,” New York Times, 14 April 1880, 8. Regarding the serial- ization of Ellis’s “Norman the Locksmith” in Golden Days, see Edward S. Ellis to Robert Bonner, 12 July 1881, Group 140-F1, Manuscript Miscellany, Yale Collec- tion of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecitcut. 43. “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 19 (New York: James T. White, 1926), 204. 44. Edward S. Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States (Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1900 [1896]), 530. See Edgar S. Maclay, History of the United States Navy, from 1775 to 1893 (New York: D. Appleton, 1894) and Alfred T. Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897). Elsewhere in the volumes Ellis noted that Cooper’s “Indians and ‘Leatherstocking’ himself are idealized, but they are none the less fascinating on that account, while his admirable style and purity of sentiment give his works a place in American literature which they will hold for generations to come.” Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States, 1748. 45. “Introductory,” in Edward S. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, Chief of the Ottawas: Together with a Full Account of the Celebrated Siege of Detroit (New York: Beadle, 1861), [8]. 46. Francis Parkman to Edward S. Ellis, 5 April 1861, “The Papers of Francis Park- man,” 7062-e, Box Barrett-Parkman, University of Virginia Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. 47. “Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians,” New York Times, 29 October 1899, 19. Titles in the Deerfoot Series include Deerfoot on the Prairies (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1905) and Deerfoot in the Mountains (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1905). 48. Gary Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 443–44. Notes to Pages 235–237 { 407

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 407407 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM 49. William T. Sherman to Edward S. Ellis, 25 January 1884, “Western Americana Collection,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 50. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” vii–viii. 51. Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), http://gaslight.mroyal.ab.ca/dimexol.htm. The quote here is from Pearson’s paraphrase of Senator Chandler’s words. See Ed- ward S. Ellis, Oonomoo, the Huron (New York: Irwin P. Beadle, Beadle’s Dime Novels, #48, 1863). 52. For more on how plagiarism was defi ned in the nineteenth century, see Richard C. Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 8–10. 53. To chart these uses and misuses of texts by Ellis, see Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910 [1851]), 357–58, and Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, 35n. 54. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, [10], 38. 55. Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 1:241–44; 2:363. 56. Comstock, Traps for the Young, 21, 24–25. 57. Ibid., 244, 10–11. 58. “Bacon’s Rebellion,” New York Times, 21 January 1905, BR42. The juvenile history referred to in this review is Edward S. Ellis, The Cromwell of Virginia: A Story of Bacon’s Rebellion (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1905). 59. Robinson, “The New History,” 12. 60. N. A. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, with the Reports of the Conference Arranged by Committee” (New York: Ameri- can Book Company for the National Educational Association, 1893), 3, 6–7. For a discussion of this report see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Confl icts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 47–49, 183. See also National Education Association, Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, United States Offi ce of Education Bulletin No. 35 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Offi ce, 1918), cited in Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: What His- tory Textbooks Have Taught Our Children about Their Country and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Random House, 1979), 169. 61. Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Moderniza- tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 31. 62. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 15–16, 28–29, 164.

408 } Notes to Pages 237–241

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 408408 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM 63. American Historical Association, “The Study of History in Schools: Report of the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven” (New York: Macmillan, 1900). 64. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 168–69. 65. Ibid., 192, 170, 186, 193, 189, 194. 66. This comment relates to a review of Ellis’s Footprints in the Forest (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1886), New York Times, 24 October 1886, 12. 67. Edward Channing to George Brett, 2 July 1897, Macmillan Company Papers, Au- thor Files, box 64, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, cited in Moreau, Schoolbook Nation, 49. 68. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popu- lar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27. 69. Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American His- tory (Boston: Ginn, 1897), 3, 135–36, 138. Eggleston’s novels did not make the list either, although one of George Cary Eggleston’s did (A Man of Honor). 70. Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” 443. For more on the relationship between dime novels and history, see Helen C. Nelson, “Navigating Nineteenth-Century Novels: Linking Historical and Literary Perspectives to Explore the Infl uence of Dime Novels in Nineteenth Century America” (MA thesis, Humboldt State University, 2005). 71. John Clark Ridpath and Edward S. Ellis, The Story of South Africa: An Account of the Historical Transformation of the Dark Continent by the European Powers and the Culminating Contest between Great Britain and the South African Republic in the Transvaal War (Springfi eld, Mass.: King-Richardson, [c. 1899]). 72. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Imagination in History,” The American Historical Review 15, no. 2 (January 1910): 229, 241, 232, 250. 73. For more on Cooper’s treatment of these themes, see Richard Slotkin, Regen- eration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 74. Edward S. Ellis, The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer. With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the West (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates [c. 1884]); The Life of Kit Carson, Hunter, Trapper, Guide, Indian Agent, and Colonel U.S.A. (New York: New York Publishing, [c. 1899]); The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett (New York: Beadle, [c. 1862]). 75. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 92. This quote comes from Pfi tzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in Camelot,” 43. 76. Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 8, 85. Notes to Pages 241–244 { 409

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 409409 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM 77. Ibid., 269. 78. Edward S. Ellis, The Youth’s History of the United States from the Discovery of America by the Northmen to the Present Time, 4 vols. (New York: Cassell, 1886– 1887). 79. Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels, 1:31– 37, 2:93–100. 80. Hart, “Imagination in History,” 229. 81. For instance, Ellis’s lengthy description of Pontiac on pages 316–26 and 351 of The Youth’s History is lifted almost wholesale from his 1861 dime novel biography, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, 35–44. 82. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, 36. 83. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 1:36. Even here Ellis took liberties with Parkman. Park- man wrote: “ ‘Why,’ demanded Pontiac, ‘do I see so many of my father’s young men standing in the street with their guns?’ Gladwyn replied through his interpreter, La Butte, that he had ordered the soldiers under arms for the sake of exercise and discipline” (Parkman, 1:235). 84. For instance, Ellis appropriated passages from the Youth’s History describing the “Messiah Movement” among the Sioux Indians of the 1890s for use in his novel Wolf Ear, the Indian, a juvenile featuring a fi erce Ogalalla Sioux who befriends two children. In both texts, Ellis wrote of the mesmerizing Ghost Dance, in which Native American “dancers took hold of hands and leaped and shouted and circled round and round until they dropped to the ground, senseless and almost dead.” The narrative structures of these accounts also match. See and compare this passage from Edward S. Ellis, Wolf Ear the Indian (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, n.d.), 6, with the account of the Ghost Dance in Youth’s History, 316, where only a few words are changed. 85. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 1:173. 86. Ibid., 1:81. 87. Ibid., 1:2–3. 88. Ibid., 1: 7, 10. 89. See John J. Anderson, A Popular School History of the United States, in Which Are Inserted as Part of the Narrative Selections from the Writings of Eminent Ameri- can Historians, and Other American Writers of Note (New York: Effi ngham May- nard, 1889), i–ii, viii. 90. This story was reported in an article titled “Some Inaccuracies of History,” in which an unknown author used Ellis as an example of a “profound student of history” who “furnishes probably the most accurate account of the killing of Wolfe that is to be found outside the histories.” The author might have been better served to associate Ellis with those popularizers whom he or she distrusted because they “dropped in” “bits of fi ction” into their narratives or “glossed over” 410 } Notes to Pages 244–248

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 410410 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM “unpleasant truths” “simply to save the popular fancy from a shock.” See “Some Inaccuracies of History,” Washington Post, 5 July 1908, M4. 91. Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (Sep- tember 1890): 290. 92. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 185–90. 93. See “A Faithless Wife,” New York Times, 11 February 1887, 2. 94. “A Divorce Quickly Granted,” New York Times, 14 June 1887, 1. See also “Sued For Heavy Damages,” New York Times, 22 February 1887, 1, and “Not a Star Cham- ber,” New York Times, 12 June 1887, 1, regarding Ellis’s suit for damages against Van Camp. 95. Ellis, The Youth’s History [rev. ed., 1899], 4:438, 436; 4:448, 446; 1:81; 1:117; 2:195. 96. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Precon- ceptions,” in Memory and American History, ed. David Thelan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 134, 138. See also David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 97. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Dis- covery of Geologic Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 42. 98. Mark C. Carnes, Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 215, 21. 99. Theodore H. Gaster, “Review of Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History,” Review of Religion, cited on the back cover of the book (trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974]) and Mir- cea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1954), xiv, 46. 100. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 3:381–82, 3:349. 101. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 9–10. 102. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 58. 103. Daniel A. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~dsegal/ahr%20article.htm, 24–26 (accessed 8/20/04). 104. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 163, 48, 150, 138, 168, 166–67. 105. Ibid., 9, 34, 38, 95, 273. 106. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ix. 107. See Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888), and H. G. Wells, The Time Ma- chine (1895). Indeed, it is telling that, as T. Jackson Lears suggests, many of those who enrolled in Nationalist Clubs created to implement Bellamy’s futuristic vision failed to distinguish adequately between its ﬁ ctional and factual elements. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 164–66, 168. Notes to Pages 248–254 { 411

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 411411 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM 108. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 567. 109. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 123. For more on presentism as a philosophical position, see David Hull, “In Defense of Presentism,” History and Theory 18 (1979): 1–15; Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered His- tory,” Historical Journal 31 (March 1988): 1–16; Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ash- plant, “Present-Centered History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge,” Historical Journal 31 (June 1988): 253–74; 110. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” viii. 111. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 105. Ellis saw the relationship between present and past as reciprocal. In The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events, he wrote: “Our every action in the present is formed upon our knowledge of the past. Hence, the fuller our understanding of that Past, which is History, the wiser will be our actions in the Present, and the keener our judgments of the Future.” See Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Horne, The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events, 10 vols. (New York: Francis R. Niglutsch, 1906), 1: preface. 112. Carnes, Novel History, 24. 113. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 80, 151. 114. G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), 5–6, 23. 115. Ibid., vii–viii. See also Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 107. 116. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 151, 11. See also Whitrow, Time in History, 170. 117. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 2–3. 118. Ibid., 2–3. For his thoughts on how conceptions of history have changed, Segal relies heavily on two works: George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), and Thomas Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See also Whitrow, Time in History, 183. 119. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 527–28. Here Ellis notes the inﬂ uence on his thinking of Professor Huxley’s 1887 History of Civilization. 120. Whitrow, Time in History, 172. 121. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 10–11, 15–16. 122. Ibid., 49–50. 123. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 119, 121, 127, 132, 141. 124. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” viii. 125. Carl Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” in Everyman His Own Historian, 176. 126. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country (Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, [1895, 1918]), [n. p.], in possession of the author. 412 } Notes to Pages 254–259

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 412412 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0812:59:08 PMPM 127. Ibid. 128. Edward S. Ellis to Helen F. Levy, 23 February 1899, #MA 2206, Pierpont Morgan Library, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, NYPR126753-A, New York, New York. 129. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country, [n. p.]. 130. Edward S. Ellis to Sidney Howard Gay, 29 July [18–], box 12, Correspondence, Sidney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University. 131. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1238, 1930, 1955. 132. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country, [n. p.]. 133. “Introduction,” The People’s Standard History, 1. See also E. S. Ellis, Stories from American History (Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1896), [ 3]. 134. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1046–47, 1177, 1181, 1964. 135. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 528. 136. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 315, 1153, 1201, 1073, 1104, 1349, 701. 137. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850– 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 31. 138. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 7:1742. 139. Edwin E. Sparks, “History of the United States, by Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in Larned, Literature of American History, 279. 140. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 242–43. 141. Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” 181, 172. Here Becker is writing a review of Wells’s Outline of History (London, 1920), although speaking generally of the presentism of non-academic history, which he admires. 142. James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, Development of Modern Europe, 1:iii, cited in Breisach, American Progressive History, 62. 143. For more on the Jones Brothers Publishing Company, see “Sketch on the Life of J. R. Jones,” in Pictorial History of the World, by James D. McCabe (Philadel- phia: National Publishing, 1877), [1263]. 144. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1588–89. 145. Ibid., 1472. 146. Ibid., 1589, 1484, 1625. 147. Captain Burrows, R.N., Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, cited in ibid., 2127. 148. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 186, 2122. 149. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 40. 150. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1994. 151. Edward S. Ellis, “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider,” [1896], Non-Partisan Bureau of Political Information, 55, Rare Books, Huntington Li- brary, San Marino, California. This anti-Spain sentiment had been with Ellis at least since the writing of the Youth’s History, in which he says, “For a nation that Notes to Pages 259–268 { 413

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 413413 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM pretends to be Christian, Spain has been for centuries one of the most horrible of all hypocrites. The Spaniard is by nature cruel and treacherous, and has always been so. If you will recall the accounts of the Spanish explorers who visited this country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you will admit that no greater miscreants ever lived. . . . Wherever the Spaniards planted their feet they became a blight, and the happiest day for the South American republics and for Mexico was when they rebelled and drove the invaders from their soil.” (4:379–80). 152. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1712, 1945, 1721–22. 153. Ibid., 2097, 2069, 1964, 1994. 154. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255. 155. Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 486. 156. Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). 157. Robinson, New History, 24, cited in Breisach, American Progressive History, 62. 158. For a more detailed discussion of photographic imagery in Ellis’s volumes, see Pﬁ tzer, Picturing the Past, 213–30. 159. John C. Ridpath, Portfolio of the World’s Photographs: Royal Photograph Gallery (Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1893), [3–4]. 160. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 2, 14. 161. Breisach, American Progressive History, 61–62. See also Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” in Everyman His Own Historian, 173. 162. Robinson, The New History, 20–21, 21–22, 23–24. 163. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1822–23, 1548, 976, 1762, 1822–23. 164. Ibid., 1829–30; 1374, 760, 1416, 1828. 165. Ibid., 2194. 166. Breisach, American Progressive History, 63. 167. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1829–30. 168. “Mr. Ellis’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 18 December 1897, BR5. 169. “Our Startling Book Offer,” New York Times, 30 November 1899, 4. 170. See Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Vintage, 1968). 171. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Social Forces in American History,” in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1920), 328. 172. Carl Becker “Detachment and the Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly 106 (Oc- tober 1910): 525–36, cited in Pﬁ tzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 56. 173. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial 64 (11 April 1918): 337–41.

414 } Notes to Pages 268–275

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 414414 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM 174. Hart, “Imagination in History,” 233, 229, 235. 175. Henry Barrett Learned, “Review of William H. Mace, Method in History for Teachers and Students,” The American Historical Review 4, no. 1 (October 1898): 133–34. 176. Carl L. Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History” (1921), reprinted in Becker, Everyman His Own Historian, 169–90, cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 2. 177. Herbert Butterﬁ eld, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931), 105–6, 31. 178. Adrian Wilson, T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered History,” 3. 179. Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 134. 180. Edward Channing, A History of the United States, 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905–25), 1:vii, cited in Pﬁ tzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 37. 181. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Vintage, 1994), 134–35. 182. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 46, 85–86. 183. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 58–59. 184. Ibid., 58–59. 185. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (London: John Murray, 1830–1833), 63, cited in Gould, Time’s Arrow, 2. 186. On this phenomenon, see Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). 187. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 35, 167, 174–75, 178. 188. Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nine- teenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3, 5. 189. Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 150, 136. 190. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 168, 173. Here Himmelfarb is citing Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962), 166. 191. Robinson, The New History, 21. 192. Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 134. 193. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 177. 194. David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 76. 195. W. Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 427. 196. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 3–4.

Notes to Pages 275–279 { 415

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 415415 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM 197. Journal of the Twenty-Sixth National Encampment Grand Army of the Repub- lic. . . . 1892, 207; Journal of the Twenty-Ninth National Encampment Grand Army of the Republic. . . . 1895, 230, cited in Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teach- ing of History, 166. Barnes’ Popular History was also singled out for criticism in this regard. Edward S. Ellis, Eclectic Primary History of the United States (New York: American Book, [c. 1884]). 198. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 3–4. 199. Sparks notes: “Several editions seem to be published under the same date, but bearing different imprints.” Sparks, “History of the United States, by Edward Syl- vester Ellis,” 279. 200. See, for instance, the review of some of Ellis’s historical works four decades after its fi rst publication, in Review of Reviews and World’s Work: An International Magazine (1937): 512. 201. “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” The National Cyclopaedia of American History, 204. For sales fi gures, see: “News,” Mercer County Community College Newsletter,” April 12, 1970, 2, in “Honorary Degree File—Edward S. Ellis,” box 6, Princeton University. 202. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis,” viii. 203. Ellis and Horne, The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events, 1: preface. 204. Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 75. See also “Bankruptcy Notices,” New York Times, 20 April 1899, 9, and 20 May 1899, 13. 205. Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” 443. 206. For more on D. W. Griffi th’s fi lm and complaints about its distortions of the past, see Pfi tzer, Picturing the Past, 241. 207. Obituary, New York Times, 22 June 1916. 208. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 155. 209. Novick, That Noble Dream, 278.

Chapter 6. Writing Himself Out of Trouble 1. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Vintage, 1994), 154. 2. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 256. 3. Thomas Bender, “Strategies of Narrative Synthesis,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (February 2002): 131. 4. Arthur Murphy, “Ideals and Ideologies, 1917–1947,” Philosophical Review 56 (1947): 386–87, cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Ques- tion” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 283. 416 } Notes to Pages 279–283

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 416416 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM 5. H. B. Acton, “Historical Materialism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), 4:12. 6. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reap- praisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 9; and Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 132. 7. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 5. 8. Alfred Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 4, cited in Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The Hague: Mouton, 1959), 21. 9. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), cited in Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 117. 10. Ephraim Douglass Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History (Port Wash- ington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969 [1913]), ix–xiii, 34, 59–60. 11. Ephraim Douglass Adams and John C. Almack, A History of the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931); See also John R. Commons, Ulrich B. Phillips, Eugene A. Gilmore, Helen L. Sumner, and John B. Andrews, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1910–11); and “The Report of the Committee of Five on American History Text- books Now in Use in California High Schools” (Sacramento: California State Printing Ofﬁ ce, 1923). 12. Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History, 138. 13. The collaborative project, a biography of Charles Francis Adams Sr., was never completed because of the untimely death of Charles Francis Adams Jr. in 1914. Ephraim Adams incorporated much of the information from that collaboration, however, in his later work on the Civil War era. See Ephraim Douglass Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1925). 14. Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History, 20, 93. 15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1959), 204–9, 40–47. Nathaniel Hawthorne, True Stories from History and Biography, vol. 6 of The Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972). 16. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “Hawthorne,” The Harvard Magazine (Cambridge, Mass.: John Bartlett, 1855), 330–33. 17. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “Hawthorne’s Place in Literature,” The Hawthorne Centenary Celebration at the Wayside, Concord, Massachusetts, July 4–7, 1904 (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, 1905), 60. 18. James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Miff- lin, 1980), 377. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, vol. 2 of The Notes to Pages 283–286 { 417

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 417417 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965). 19. Gregory M. Pfi tzer, “When Life Imitates Art: Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s Curi- ous Reader-Response to Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables,” American Transcendental Quarterly, n.s. 8:2 (June 1994): 78. Adams’s point of view was corroborated by other New England scholars who also benefi ted from Haw- thorne’s historical insights. See Rufus Choate, “The Importance of Illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances,” The New England Magazine, November 1897. 20. Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American His- tory (Boston: Ginn, 1896), 136–38. See also Jane Goodwin Austin, Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1890). For other discussions of the use of historical novels in classrooms, see R. F. Charles, “The Use of Historical Romances in the Teaching of History,” The Educational Times, November 1897. 21. Jonathan Nield, A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 1–4. Nield drew on a previous study for his preliminary research: A Descriptive Catalogue of Historical Novels and Tales, for Use of School Libraries and Teachers of History, compiled and described by H. Courthope Bowen (London: Edward Stanford, 1882). 22. J. Brander Matthews, “The Historical Novel,” in The Historical Novel and Other Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901). Matthews’s essay appeared originally in the September 1897 edition of The Forum. 23. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. 24. Paul Leicester Ford, “The American Historical Novel,” Atlantic Monthly 80 (De- cember 1897): 721–28. Among other things, Ford argues that “the colonial laws of Massachusetts decreed a totally different story from that Hawthorne tells in The Scarlet Letter” (721). 25. Mark C. Carnes, ed., Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 14. 26. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 273. 27. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1897), 197, cited in Maurice Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son: The Life and Literary Ca- reer of Julian Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), 9. 28. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 286. 29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Twenty days with Julian and little Bunny, a diary,” Haw- thorne Papers, AC8 H3188 904t, Houghton Library, Harvard University, cited in Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 273. For more on the relationship of father to son, including the essay “Nathaniel Hawthorne Described by His 418 } Notes to Pages 286–288

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 418418 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:0912:59:09 PMPM Son,” see Autograph Notebook, n.d., #103765, MA 1375, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 30. Edith Garrigues Hawthorne, ed., The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 3, 298. 31. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903), xvi. 32. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885), 1:422, 419–20. 33. Julian Hawthorne, “Literary Lights of Old Concord,” typescript, box I, Julian Hawthorne Papers [ca. 1896–1939], Banc MSS 87/23 c, Bancroft Library, Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California (hereafter cited as Julian Haw- thorne Papers), 290–91. 34. For more on this sojourn to Italy, see Pocket Diary, 1858, box 1, Hawthorne Family Papers. S 72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Berkeley, California (hereafter cited as Hawthorne Family Papers). Also see Julian Hawthorne, Autograph Diary, 1857 May to 1859 October, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, #103180, MA 1377, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 35. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son: Julian Hawthorne’s Beginnings & Beliefs,” http://www.violetbooks.com/julianhawthrone.html, accessed 7/16/2005), [1–2]. For more on the relationship between Sophia and Julian, see “Correspondence,” and “Journals, 1829–1869,” in the Sophia Peabody Haw- thorne Collection of Papers, 1775–1949, MSS Hawthorne S., Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York City. 36. [Julian Hawthorne], “The Art of Illuminating: A Boy’s Adventure in Books,” [1929], box 6, BANC MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. For samples of Hawthorne’s juvenile illustrations, see “Sketchbook, ca. 1858–1860, containing drawings by both Mrs. Hawthorne and her son, Julian,” Papers of Sophia Ame- lia (Peabody) Hawthorne, box 2, and “Sketches,” box 6, folder 3, in the same collection. 37. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 17. 38. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [3]. For more on Una and her relationship with her brother, see “Correspondence [1851] to 1867,” Una Hawthorne Collection of Papers, [1851]–1874, Berg Collection, MSS Hawthorne U., New York Public Library, New York. 39. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 7. In Julian’s personal boyhood library were works of history by Herodotus and Motley as well as Rollins’s An- cient History and Tacitus. See “A Catalogue of Books in [Julian Hawthorne’s] Library, 1875,” carton 2, folder 10, Notebooks, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See also [Julian Hawthorne], “The Art of Illuminating: A Boy’s Adventure in Books, [1929],” box 6, in the same collection. Notes to Pages 289–291 { 419

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 419419 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM 40. J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 7, 1–2. 41. Ibid., 292–93, 103–4. 42. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 10. 43. Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893), 191–92. 44. For more on Hawthorne’s relationship with Sanborn, see Julian Hawthorne to F. B. Sanborn, 10 January 1883, MSS 7694-c, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. 45. J. Hawthorne, “Literary Lights of Old Concord,” 7. 46. For more on Julian’s academic career at Harvard, see “Julian Hawthorne— Academic Transcript,” HUG 300, Biography—General and Collected, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Mass. 47. Harold P. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Harris E. Starr, vol. 21, supp.1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 386. 48. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 19. 49. Julian Hawthorne, “Hawthorne’s Last Years,” in The Hawthorne Centenary Cel- ebration at the Wayside, 117. 50. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [3–4]. 51. See H. C. Heywood, “A Son Who Would Emulate His Father,” in How They Strike Me, These Authors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877), and Mabel Collins, “The Son of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Dublin University Magazine 90 (August 1877): 236–39. 52. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [5]. The ﬁ rst story Julian had published was “Love & Counter Love; or, Masquerading,” for which he was paid $50.00. 53. “Charles Honce’s A Julian Hawthorne Collection,” (New York: Privately printed, 1939), #66-978, Houghton Library, Harvard University, provides a thorough bibliography of his works. See also Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 259–74. 54. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [6]. 55. Review of Bressant, Nation, 10 July 1873, 27. 56. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, x. 57. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” 386. 58. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, xxi. 59. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 587. 60. Lionel Stevenson, “Dean of American Letters: Julian Hawthorne,” Bookman 73 (April 1931): 166. 61. For more on the mind/body split in the novels of Julian and Nathaniel Haw- thorne, see “About Novels,” [1890s?], carton 2, folder 12, Notebooks, and “How to Write Novels,” 1879, carton 2, folder 4, Journals, both in Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 420 } Notes to Pages 291–295

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 420420 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM 62. Julian Hawthorne, “The Desire for Truth,” The Booklover’s Weekly, 25 November 1901, “Miscellany,” box 6, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 63. Julian Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms (Boston: Ticknor, 1887), 111–12. 64. See Julian Hawthorne, Garth: A Novel, 3 vols. (New York: Appleton’s, 1877) and Fortune’s Fool, 3 vols. (Boston: Osgood, 1883). 65. Julian Hawthorne, “Thinking Things Over,” (Chapter IX), box 2, Banc MSS 87/23c, Julian Hawthorne Papers, vol. 1, p. 80. 66. Julian Hawthorne, “The Picture Show,” p. 21, Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. 67. For a thematic analysis of “A Picturesque Transformation,” see Bassan, Haw- thorne’s Son, 79. 68. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 160. 69. Julian Hawthorne, “Notebook [1890s],” carton 2, folder 12, Banc MSS, 72/236z, Julian Hawthorne Papers. 70. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 141. 71. Julian Hawthorne, The Spectre of the Camera; or, The Professor’s Sister: A Ro- mance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888). 72. John Nichol, “American Novelist, 1850–1880,” in American Literature: An His- torical Sketch, 1620–1880 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1882), 388. 73. [Review of Dust], Atlantic Monthly 51 (May 1883): 706. See Dust: A Novel, 3 vols. (New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1883). 74. Henry James, [Review of Idolatry], Atlantic Monthly 34 (December 1874): 746– 48. See also David W. Pancost, “Henry James and Julian Hawthorne,” American Literature 50 (November 1978): 461–65. 75. George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian of California,” in The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 39 (March 1957): 19–20. 76. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 45. 77. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 19. 78. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 122–23. 79. In 1886 Julian published remarks from a private conversation he had had with James Russell Lowell, to which the poet and family friend objected on the grounds of violation of privacy. This was “particularly damaging to Hawthorne since it led to questions concerning his professional ethics, and he was thereafter considered a journalistic malefactor by many.” See “Julian Hawthorne, 1846– 1934,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, ed. Dennis Poupard (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), vol. 25, 228. See also a letter that Lowell wrote to the editor of the Herald registering “a strong complaint against a Julian Hawthorne article in the ‘Herald’s’ morning edition.” James Russell Lowell to the Editor of the Her- ald, 30 October 1886, MSS 6219-aa, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Notes to Pages 296–299 { 421

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 421421 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM Virginia. See also Margaret Fuller, “Testimonials of James F. Clarke, etc., against the Statements . . . in . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne & His Wife” (Boston, 1885). 80. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 121. 81. Fred Hawthorne to Charles E. Honce, 17 January 1939, box 3, Banc MSS 89/201z, Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910. 82. Hawthorne defended himself against the accusation in a letter, “To the Editor of The New Metropolitan, T.L.S., 1903 June 30,” Banc MSS 89/201z, Julian Haw- thorne Papers, 1878–1910. 83. 17 February 1873, cited in Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 87–88. 84. See Julian Hawthorne to Lorenz Reich, 1 May 1895, concerning a position Haw- thorne was offered by the New York Herald, in #104278, MA 3400, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library. 85. Julian Hawthorne to Mayo W. Hazeltine, 1908 March 28, anc MSS 89/201z, Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910. For a sample of Hawthorne’s newspaper articles, see “Clippings of stories and articles by Hawthorne,” box 6, and Scrapbook 2, carton 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, in the same collection. 86. The many locations to which Hawthorne traveled can be pieced together by following the itinerary associated with his articles written over a lengthy career. See “Clippings Written by Julian Hawthorne,” box 3, Banc MSS 87/23c and MSS 72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Also see Hawthorne’s “India Journal of 1897,” Yale University Archives, Sterling Library, New Haven, Connecticut. 87. Julian Hawthorne, “Objections to Football,” New York Times, 5 December 1897, 22. 88. “Julian Hawthorne Talks of the Negro,” Atlanta Constitution, 22 April 1901, 7. 89. “Mr. Hawthorne and the Race Question,” Washington Post, 29 May 1899, 6. 90. “Abusing Mr. McKinley,” Washington Post, 31 October 1896, 6. 91. “Julian Hawthorne and Others,” Washington Post, 7 October 1898, 6. 92. “Hawthorne and His Fits,” Washington Post, 12 October 1898, 6. 93. Julian Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” box 6, Banc MSS 87/23c, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. See also Julian Hawthorne, “Journalism the Destroyer of Lit- erature,” Critic 48 (February 1906): 166–71. 94. Julian Hawthorne to Mayo W. Hazeltine, 1908 March 28, Banc MSS 89/201z, B Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910. 95. Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” 195. 96. Julian Hawthorne, The Story of Oregon: A History with Portraits and Biogra- phies, 2 vols. (New York: American Historical Publishing, 1892). 97. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 190, 194–95. See Julian Hawthorne, Humors of the Fair (Chicago: Weeks, 1893). 98. Julian Hawthorne to W. D. Vincent, 14 November 1926, box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Miscellaneous Hawthorne Papers, Hawthorne Family Papers. 422 } Notes to Pages 299–302

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 422422 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM 99. “A Queer Text-Book, Strange Production of a Texan and Julian Hawthorne,” New York Tribune, box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon, American Literature: A Text Book for Use of Schools and Colleges (Boston: Heath, 1896). See also “Hawthorne- Lemmon on American Literature,” Conservator 7 (December 1896): 151–53. 100. W. Leonard Lemmon to Justin Hawthorne, 20 October 1896, box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 101. Harold P. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” 387. See also “ ‘Hawthorne’s Text Book’: The Tempest Raised in the Flushing Teapot and Its Absurdity,” 17 October 1896, Scrapbook 3, p. 15, Banc MSS, 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 102. Julian Hawthorne, “Frederic Chapman’s Fascinating Story of the Royal Palaces in and Near London,” The Washington Post, 16 February 1902, 28. Chapman’s book was Royal Palaces In and Near London (London: John Lane, 1901). 103. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 190. For more on Hawthorne’s philosophy of history, see “Hawthorne’s Philosophy,” [1884], Holo. MS. S., Bixby HM 12215, Hunting- ton Library, San Marino, California. 104. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 43. 105. J[ulian] H[awthorne], “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civiliza- tion from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,” Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 106. For more on this relativistic philosophy and the historical profession, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 133–67. 107. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 206–7. 108. Hawthorne, “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civilization,” Scrap- book 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. Alan Trachtenberg, Read- ing American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 27. 109. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s History of the United States, 3 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier, 1898; revised edition, 1900), 7, 82. All subsequent references will be to the 1898 edition unless otherwise indicated. Although published in three volumes, the pages are numbered consecutively and therefore are listed here without reference to a speciﬁ c volume. 110. For more on Collier’s, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–1968), 4:453–79. Hawthorne contracted simultaneously for another volume in the Nations of the World series: Julian Hawthorne, Spanish America, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York: P. F. Collier, 1899). 111. Display Ad 5–No Title, New York Times, 10 April 1909, 4. I have included Haw- thorne’s United States in the category of “popular history” because it was part of a larger series of books that anthologized “popular histories” of the world, Notes to Pages 302–305 { 423

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 423423 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM including Guizot’s and Green’s. For sales information, see R. R. Bowker, ed., The American Catalogue, 1895–1900 (New York, Peter Smith, 1941), 210. The three- volume set of Hawthorne’s United States sold for $8. See England, by J. R. Green, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne, 4 vols. (New York: Cooperative Publication Society, 1898) and T. C. Gratton, Holland: The History of the Netherlands, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne (New York: Collier, 1899). 112. For a sampling of Julian Hawthorne’s diaries, see “Journal, 1868 and 1869,” Julian Hawthorne Collection of Papers, 1852–1908, Berg Collection, MSS Hawthorne, J., New York Public Library. 113. Julian Hawthorne, “Diary, 1899,” carton 2, folder 7, Banc MSS 72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. 114. At one point Julian Hawthorne was reduced to endorsing clothing for W. C. Lof- tus & Co. in New York City. The following display ad appeared in the New York Times in April of 1900: “Dear Sirs—I have been wearing the suit of clothes you made for me ever since I got them. They are good clothes, well cut and made, buttons on tight, and in all ways satisfactory. In appearance they are as good as a suit of three times the price. I shall come to you again. Meanwhile I remain, Julian Hawthorne.” Display Ad 5–No Title, New York Times, 8 April 1900, 6. 115. Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s History of the United States, vii, v–vi, xii. Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” in Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935). 116. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 826–27. 117. For Julian’s take on his father’s psychologizing in The Scarlet Letter, see Julian Hawthorne, “Problems of The Scarlet Letter,” Atlantic Monthly 57 (April 1886): 471–85, and “The Making of The Scarlet Letter,” Bookman 74 (December 1931): 401–11. 118. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, viii–ix. 119. Ibid., vii, vi, vii. 120. Ibid., ix, 2, x. 121. Ibid., 6, ix, 292. 122. Ibid., 118–19, 9, 17, 4, 123, 50, 9, 1045, 9. 123. For more on Hawthorne’s attitudes toward spiritualism, see Julian Hawthorne, “Is Spiritualism Worth While?” Arena 3 (May 1891): 674–79. 124. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 307, 428, 333. 125. For more on Schama’s treatment of Wolfe and its relationship to the narration of history, see Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 126. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 74, 104, 253, 175, 165–66, 175, 165–66, 582, 600, 582, 583. 424 } Notes to Pages 306–312

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 424424 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1012:59:10 PMPM 127. Ibid., 935, 735, 937–38, 934, 937–38, 923. 128. Ibid., 14, 788, 886. 129. Ibid., 9, 723, 138–39. 130. Ibid., 205, 275, 280. 131. Ibid., 111, 46, 552, 741. 132. For more on Julian Hawthorne’s relationship to Longfellow as poet, see Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to “Dear Sir,” 23 February 1871, and Samuel Longfellow to Julian Hawthorne, 7 February 1883, in Letters of Henry and Samuel Long- fellow, MSS 6221-m, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. 133. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 58, 433–34, 1108. 134. Charles Francis Adams Jr., Autobiography (Boston, 1916), 204–7. 135. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965, 1972), 15. 136. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 210, 56. In a section of Haw- thorne’s United States on the rise of American literature in the nineteenth century, Julian acknowledged playfully the important role his father had played in shaping the contemporary literary scene. “Cooper was our only great novelist so far,” he wrote, “though a young man named Nathaniel Hawthorne had become known to a few as showing promise in some short tales and sketches. . . . In short, the gate of modern times was swinging ajar” (819). 137. For Butterworth’s perspective on Puritanism, see Hezekiah Butterworth, ed., Popular History of America, in the Popular Historical Series (Boston: Estes and Lauriat Publishers, 1898). Butterworth was an assistant editor at the “Youth’s Companion,” and published a series of popular “Zig-Zag Journeys” from 1876 to 1886. 138. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 406, 655, 686, 773. 139. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 18. 140. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 334, 366–67, 419. 141. Ibid., 53, 214–15. 142. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 142. 143. Patrick Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 399. Here I am employing the language of Finney’s critique of Robert Young’s France and the Origins of the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1996). 144. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 34, 29, 34. 145. Edwin E. Sparks, [Review of Julian Hawthorne, History of the United States], in The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. J. N. Larned (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂ in, 1902), 281. 146. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 259, 262, 182. Notes to Pages 313–320 { 425

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 425425 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 147. Ibid., 1081, 864, 11, x–xi. 148. Ibid., 840, 1148, 1060, 1061, 1057–58, 1071–72. 149. Ibid., 1074, 553, 1047, 1052–53. 150. Edwin E. Sparks, [Review of Julian Hawthorne, History of the United States], 281. There were those who admired greatly Julian’s style, including his friend William Morton, who, upon receiving copies of Hawthorne’s United States, wrote: “There are limits to expression, unless one has Hysteria, and my limit of expression was, ‘Now that is written exactly as I would like to have it written. I could not nor would not add one word to it, nor change a word.’ ” See William James Morton to Julian Hawthorne, 21 March 1899, box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 151. See, for instance, S. H. Pendleton’s complaints about in “Errors Julian Haw- thorne Has Made,” New York Times, 13 May 1899, BR314. 152. Ada Shurmer, “The Reading of Historical Novels and the Study of History,” The Scots Magazine, April 1900. See also C. S. Fearenside, “Historical Novels and Their Uses in Teaching,” The School World, November 1900. 153. Pendleton, “Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made,” BR314. 154. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 1054–55. 155. David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88, 93. 156. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 118. Here Rosenberg applies the same argument to the baby boom generation of the mid-twentieth century. 157. “Old Things,” Scribner’s 41 (1907): 636, cited in Shi, Facing Facts, 93. Here the writer is complaining primarily about the materialism implicit in photography and moving pictures. 158. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 92, 1055–56, 1054–55. 159. Shi, Facing Facts, 89. 160. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 78, 160–61, 164. 161. Julian Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” box 6, Banc MSS 87/23c, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. 162. Julian Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms, 9. 163. Julian Hawthorne to Paul Hamilton Hayne, 24 December 1885, cited in Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 173–74. 164. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 3. 165. For more on this mining episode, see William James Morton to Julian Hawthorne, 10 July 1908, “Letters to Julian Hawthorne,” box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. Hawthorne was rumored as well to be involved in a similar plan to offer shares in “Temagami,” an African mining operation. See Julian Hawthorne to F. W. Freeman, 30 September 1908, #195190, MA 4628 (4), Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library. 426 } Notes to Pages 321–327

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 426426 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 166. Julian Hawthorne to W. H. Miller, 12 August 1908, “Hawthorne Family Papers,” box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See also Julian Hawthorne to James Benners, 20 May 1910, “Julian Hawthorne Papers,” Banc MSS 89/201 z, in the same collection. This letter includes a Prospectus for the “Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Limited.” 167. This “gold” and “silver” remark came back to haunt Hawthorne in his trial. Among others, it convinced Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (a man who knew something himself about gold and silver standards) not to bring a petition for pardon to President Wilson on Hawthorne’s behalf. See Julian Haw- thorne to W. J. Bryan, 24 March 1913, box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 168. Julian Hawthorne to Edith Garrigues, 6 August 1908, box 4, folder 1900–1919, box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. 169. For more on Hawthorne’s conviction and subsequent jail term, see “Papers Relat- ing to Hawthorne’s Term in Atlanta Federal Prison, 1912–13,” box 6, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See also a series of articles on Julian Haw- thorne’s charges against the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, “Julian Hawthorne,” box I, HUG–300, Biography—General and Collected, Pusey Library, Harvard University Archives. 170. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Time, 388. 171. See, for instance, the letters between Julian Hawthorne and Dr. Theodore F. Wolfe, 1 October 1908 and 6 February 1912, regarding the mine and Hawthorne’s subsequent indictment in “Letters, 1908 & 1912,” MSS 7694-f, Clifton Waller Library, University of Virginia. 172. Logan Wilshire, cited in George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian in Cali- fornia,” 14–36. 173. Julian Hawthorne, The Subterranean Brotherhood (New York: McBride, Nast, 1914). For a not very favorable review of this work, see F. Emory Lyon, “Sub- terranean Brotherhood,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 6, no. 1 (May 1915): 154–56. 174. “Hawthorne Out of Prison: Freed with Dr. Morton, Novelist Declares Prisoners Are Starved,” New York Times, 16 October 1913. 175. For more on this period of Julian Hawthorne’s life, see Lon F. Chapin, “Looking Backward,” Pasadena Star News, 15 December 1928, n.p.; “Writer Paid Tribute at Banquet: Julian Hawthorne Honor Guest on Birthday,” Pasadena Star News, 23 June 1931, n. p.; and “Famed Dean of Letters Passes On,” Pasadena Star News, 4 July 1934, n.p., Pasadena Public Library Newpaper Files, Pasadena, California. 176. Wilshire, cited in George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian in California,” in The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 39, no. 1 (March 1957): 14–36, Pasadena Public Library Newpaper Files. Notes to Pages 327–330 { 427

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 427427 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 177. “Famed Dean of Letters Passes On,” Pasadena Star News, 4 July 1934, n.p. See also “Biographical Information re: Julian Hawthorne,” The American Biographi- cal Encyclopedia, box 4, “Papers of Julian Hawthorne,” Hawthorne Family Papers. See also “Letters and Telegrams re: Hawthorne’s 85th Birthday Celebra- tion, 1931,” box 6, in the same collection. 178. “J. Hawthorne, Novelist’s Son, Dies, Aged 88: Julian, Himself an Author, Had Written Little Since 1900,” Boston Transcript, 14 July 1934, n.p., and “Julian Hawthorne, Dead on Coast, 88: Only Son of Famous Novelist Had Long Been Ill—Proliﬁ c Author of 60 Years,” “Newspaper Articles,” Julian Hawthorne— Biography, HUG 300 Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library.

Conclusion: The Unpopularity of Popular History 1. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926, 1939). 2. A reviewer of a draft of this manuscript once tried to convince me that John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (3 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1938]) qualifi ed as a work of popular history by a twentieth-century novelist, but it is clearly not intended as a comprehensive survey history of the United States. 3. For more on these journalists-turned-historians, see John Higham, History: Pro- fessional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 75–77, and Gregory M. Pfi tzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 76, 138–39, 140–44. See also Samuel Eliot Morison, “Faith of an Historian,” in By Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 347– 48, 356; see also Morison, “History through a Beard,” 345. 4. Morison’s review of Brooks’s work can be found in Samuel Eliot Morison, “Re- view of The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865, by Van Wyck Brooks,” Ameri- can Historical Review 42 (1937): 564. Morison was the grandson and namesake of the failed historian Samuel Eliot. 5. Samuel Eliot Morison to Van Wyck Brooks, 5 February 1937, The Samuel Eliot Morison Collection, HUG(FP)–33.15, box 2, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as Morison Collection), as cited in Pfi tzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 140–44. For Brooks’s thoughts on these matters, see Van Wyck Brooks to Samuel Eliot Morison, 8 October 1936, 2 February 1937, 27 April 1937, SEMC HUG(FP)–33.15, box 2, Morison Collection. 6. For more on this debate, see Samuel Eliot Morison, “History as Literary Art,” in By Land and By Sea, 290–91. In this article Morison urges professional historians to pay more attention to their writing and not to abandon literary style even as they pursue the facts.

428 } Notes to Pages 330–333

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 428428 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 7. C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 201. 8. Andrew P. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 181. 9. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 23. 10. Patrick Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 400–401. 11. Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 10. 12. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 182. Here Norman cites Roland Barthes, “In- troduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Communications 8 (1966). 13. Woodward, The Future of the Past, viii. 14. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 11, cited in Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 182. 15. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 2. 16. Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” xiv. 17. Woodward, The Future of the Past, xi. 18. John R. Musick’s papers are held in Special Collections, Ms Collection #M4, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. They include a scrapbook with articles, stories, poems, and letters to the editor. There is also a brief biography: P. O. Selby, “John R. Musick,” Bits of Adair County His- tory 6 (January 1972–November 1974). 19. John R. Musick, Columbian Historical Novels: Being a Complete History of the United States from the Time of Columbus to the Present Day, with Reading Courses, 13 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893–94). 20. Edwin Markham, ed., The Real America In Romance, 13 vols. (New York: Wil- liam H. Wise, 1909–1910). 21. For more on this poem and poet, see Charles Duncan, “Edwin Markham,” Nineteenth -Century American Western Writers, ed. Robert L. Gale, vol. 186 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), 229. For a listing of Markham’s works, see Sophie K. Shields, Edwin Markham: A Bibliography, 3 vols. (Staten Island, N.Y.: Wagner College, 1952–1955). There are also some papers in the Cornelius Greenway Collection of the Edwin Markham Papers at Wichita State University; see also Markham’s correspondence with another popularizer, Hamilton Wright Mabie, esp. Mabie to Mr. Markham, 13 March 1899, The Edwin Markham Papers, Edwin Markham Library and Manuscripts Collection,

Notes to Pages 333–335 { 429

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 429429 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM Horrmann Library, Wagner College, Staten Island, New York (hereafter cited as Markham Papers). 22. In a 1902 interview, Markham acknowledged his affi nities with the interests of these popularizers, especially the concerns about materialism shared in common with Hawthorne. “There is a deep need for something to temper the hard materialism of the hour,” he noted. “The poet—the revealer of Beauty—is a precious possession for any people. For he comes with power to open paths for our feet into the lofty places of the ideal—paths of escape from the hard monotone of our daily lives, from the iron despotism of the actual. And the ideal is not a vapor, a house of cloud; it is the most vital reality known to man.” See “A Conversation with Edwin Markham, on The Poet as a Teacher,” The Arena, December 1902. 23. B. O. Flower, “Edwin Markham: Poet of Democracy,” in Progressive Men, Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-Five Years (Boston: The New Arena, 1914). The original was published as “Edwin Markham: The Poet-Prophet of De- mocracy,” The Arena 35 (February 1906): 143–46. For correspondence between Markham and editors at The Arena, see B. O. Flower to Mr. Markham, 25 Octo- ber 1899, “Markham letter Flower B No. 7 ”; 9 September 1899; 12 August 1899, 7 October 1899, Markham Papers. 24. Edwin Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” in The Real America in Romance, 1: vii–ix. See also William Wise to Mr. Markham, 27 April 1912, “Markham letter Wise W. No. 1,” Markham Papers. 25. Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” x–xv. 26. John Jakes, The Kent Family Chronicles (New York: Jove Publications; Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974–1978). 27. On the distinctions between historical fi ction and fi ctional history, see Jonathan Nield, A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales, for Use of School Libraries and Teachers of History, compiled and described by H. Courthope Bowen (Ed- ward Stanford, 1882). See also C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), vii. 28. “Testimonials, ca. 1920, about a set of Books, The Real American in Romance,” in Miscellaneous, Roland Jones, Family Papers, 1840–1969, M-072, folder 2, Special Collections, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, Louisiana. 29. Louis Filler, The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Signifi cance (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1966). 30. Paul Fatout, Review of “The Unknown Edwin Markham,” Journal of American History 53, no. 4 (March 1967): 836–37. 31. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Am- herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 6, 8, 9. 32. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 10.

430 } Notes to Pages 335–339

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 430430 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 33. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 151. 34. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 10. 35. On the “end of history,” see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 36. Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,” 398. 37. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 183, 188. 38. Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. 39. See Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fiction, Fraud—American His- tory from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 40. David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977). 41. These words appear in the citation accompanying the honorary degree Mc- Cullough received from Yale in 1998. “David McCullough,” www.simonsays. com (accessed 5/28/03). 42. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 43. For useful discussions of the distinctions between “popular” and “professional” approaches to the past, see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1998) and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 44. “A Conversation with David McCullough, author of John Adams,” in the Au- thor Interview section of “David McCullough,” www.simonsays.com (accessed 5/28/03). 45. Gary R. Edgerton, “Chalk, Talk, and Videotape: Utilizing Ken Burns’ Television Histories in the Classroom,” Organization of American Historians: Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 18. 46. For more on John Adams’s reputation among historians over time, see Paul C. Nagel, Descent From Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). In polls conducted between 1982 and 1994 by the Siena Research Institute, John Adams has been ranked no higher than tenth among presidents but no lower than fourteenth. 47. “A Conversation with David McCullough,” www.simonsays.com (accessed 5/28/03).

Notes to Pages 339–342 { 431

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 431431 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1112:59:11 PMPM 48. “John Adams by David McCullough Book Review,” www.webdesk.com/john- adams (accessed 5/28/03). 49. James H. Billington, “David McCullough, Chronicler of America: An Apprecia- tion,” www.neh.fed.us (accessed 5/28/03). 50. Sean Wilentz, “America Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History,” New Republic, 2 July 2001. 51. Hillel Itale, “Controversy Hounds Popular History Writers,” Domestic News, Associated Press, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 10/31/02). 52. Higham, History, 84. 53. Wilentz, “American Made Easy,” 39. 54. The term “guild historians” is used by Leo Marx in “Believing in America: An Intellectual Project and a National Ideal,” Boston Review: A Political and Liter- ary Forum (online edition), http://bostonreview.net/BR28.6/marx.html. 55. Billington, “David McCullough, Chronicler of America: An Appreciation,” n.p. 56. James E. McWilliams, “Historians of the World Unite?” The American Enter- prise Online, www.facmag.com (accessed 6/28/03). 57. Paul Greenberg, “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?” (6 July 2001) Tribune Media Ser- vices www.townhall.com (accessed 6/27/03). 58. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7–11. 59. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 6. A revealing demonstration of the blurring of these distinctions can be seen in a recent online exchange in a chat room in which one frustrated graduate student asked for advice about how to become a popular historian. The student did not couch this request in terms of narrative strategies or methods of emplotment or modes of voicing and viewpoint; instead the writer asked: “Is there a professional organization? And if so, how much are the dues?” Ironically misguided and deeply insightful all at the same time, such questions suggest why the term “popular history” is so elusive and difﬁ cult to pin down. See jgawne, “History vs. Popular History,” comment about “How the Am- brose Story Developed,” 8 April 2002, History News Network, Center for His- tory and New Media, George Mason University, http://hnn.us/board.php?id’504 (accessed 10/16/02). 60. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), 383–84. Warren himself denied that the portrait of Stark was a strict biography of Long. See Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men: The Matrix of Experience,” The Yale Review 8 (1963): 163–64. See also Ladell Payne, “Willie Stark and Huey Long: Atmosphere, Myth, or Suggestion?” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of All the King’s Men: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert H. Chambers (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977): 98. 61. Robert Penn Warren, cited in Woodward, The Future of the Past, 233–34. 432 } Notes to Pages 342–347

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 432432 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM Bibliography

Archival Materials American Historical Association. Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. Beadle and Adams Archives, 1848–1920. Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware. Benson J. Lossing Papers. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Biography—General and Collected. Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bryant–Godwin Papers. Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. “Class Publications and Records.” HUG 300 and HUD 222.00, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Collection of James Whitcomb Riley. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Cornelius C. Felton Papers, 1839–1879. Harvard University Corporation Records, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cornelius Greenway Collection of the Edwin Markham Papers. Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas. Cory Family Papers. Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. Duyckinck Family Papers. New York Public Library, New York. Edward Eggleston Letters. Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana. Edward Eggleston Papers. Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Edwin Markham Papers. Edwin Markham Library and Manuscripts Collection, Horrmann Library, Wagner College. Staten Island, New York. George W. Julian Papers. Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana. George Lippard Papers. The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. George Palmer Putnam Collection. Princeton University Archives, Princeton, New Jersey. Hawthorne Family Papers. Banc MSS 72/236z, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 433433 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM Hawthorne Papers. AC8 H3188 904t, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. John R. Musick Papers. Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. Julian Hawthorne Collection. #7694-C, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. Julian Hawthorne Collection of Papers, 1852–1908. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York, New York. Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910. BANC MSS 89/201z, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California. Letters of Henry and Samuel Longfellow. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. Literary and Historical Manuscripts. NYPR126753-A, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, New York. Macmillan Company Papers, Author Files. Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, New York. Manuscript Miscellany. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Papers of Albert J. Beveridge. General Correspondence, 1890–1927, Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Papers of Edward Eggleston. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. Francis Parkman Collection. #7062-E, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. Ridpath Papers. DePauw University Archives, Greencastle, Indiana. Roland Jones. Family Papers, 1840–1969. Special Collections, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, Louisiana. Samuel Eliot Papers. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts. Samuel Eliot Morison Papers. Pusey Library, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers, 1775–1949. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York, New York. Sydney Howard Gay Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Archives, New York, New York. Tucker W. Taylor Papers. Manuscript Section, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana. Una Hawthorne Collection of Papers, [1851]–1874. Berg Collection, MSS Hawthorne, U. New York Public Library, New York. Western Americana Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 434 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 434434 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM Western Association of Writers Collection. Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Works by Popular Historians Anderson, John J. A Popular School History of the United States, in Which Are Inserted as Part of the Narrative Selections from the Writings of Eminent American Historians, and Other American Writers of Note. New York: Efﬁ ngham Maynard, 1889. Butterworth, Hezekiah, ed. Popular History of America. The Popular Historical Series. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1898. Bryant, William Cullen, and Sydney Howard Gay. Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. 4 vols. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876–1881. ———, and Noah Brooks. Scribner’s Popular History of the United States. 5 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. Cooper, James Fenimore. The History of the Navy of the United States of America. New York and London: R. Bentley. 1839. Duyckinck, Evert Augustus. History of the World: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. 4 vols. Compiled by Duyckinck. New York: Johnson, Fry, 1869. ———. Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving. New York: Richardson, 1860. ———. “Literary Prospects of 1845.” The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science 1 (February 1845): 146–51. ———. National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval. New York: Johnson, Fry, 1861. ———. National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans. 2 vols. New York: Johnson, Fry, 1862. ———, and George L. Duyckinck. Cyclopaedia of American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1855; revised and enlarged, 1866. Eggleston, Edward. “Autobiographical Article.” #110B, box 15–16, folder 5, Edward Eggleston Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections. Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. ———. The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America with Reference to the Life and Character of the People. New York: D. Appleton, 1896. ———. “Books That Have Helped Me.” The Forum 3 (August 1887): 584. ———. The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York. New York: D. Appleton, 1891. ———. First Book in American History. New York: American Book, 1899. ———. “Formative Inﬂ uences.” The Forum 10 (November 1890): 279–90. ———. A History of the United States and Its People, For the Use of Schools. New York: American Book, 1888. ———. The Household History of the United States and Its People. New York: D. Appleton, 1890. Bibliography { 435

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 435435 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM ———. “The New History.” American Historical Association Annual Report, vol. 1, 35–47. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Ofﬁ ce, 1900. ———. Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans. New York: American Book, 1895. ———. The Story of Columbus, by Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, edited by Dr. Edward Eggleston. New York: D. Appleton, 1892. Ellis, Edward S. Eclectic Primary History of the United States. New York: American Book, [c. 1884]. ———. Health, Wealth, and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent and Child; to Man and Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor. Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1892. ———. The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies. New York: Beadle and Adams, 1865; 1882 half-dime edition. ———. The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett. New York: Beadle, [1862]. ———. The Life of Kit Carson, Hunter, Trapper, Guide, Indian Agent, and Colonel U.S.A. New York: New York Publishing, [c1899]. ———. The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, Chief of the Ottawas: Together with a Full Account of the Celebrated Siege of Detroit. New York: Beadle, 1861. ———. The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer. With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the West. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates [c. 1884]. ———. The People’s Standard History of the United States. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1900 [1896]. ———. Popular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to Present Time: Including Complete Triumphs of the 19th Century. Chicago: George Spiel, 1900. ———. “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider” [1896]. Non-Partisan Bureau of Political Information 55. Rare Books, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ———. Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier. New York: Beadle, 1860. ———. Stories from American History. Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1896. ———. Tales Told Out of School. Syracuse, N.Y.: C. W. Bardeen, 1899. ———. The Youth’s History of the United States from the Discovery of America by the Northmen to the Present Time. 4 vols. New York: Cassell, 1886–1887. Frost, John. Enoch Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolution. Cincinnati, U. P. James [1841?]. ———. The Pictorial History of the United States of America. 4 vols. Philadelphia: Benjamin Walker, 1844. ———. The Popular History of the United States. New York: Hurst, 1881 [1845]. Green, J[ohn] R[ichard]. A Short History of the English People. London: Crown, 1875. 436 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 436436 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM Guizot, Francois. A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times. Translated by Robert Black. Boston: D. Estes and C. E. Lauriat [187?]. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. True Stories from History and Biography. Vol. 6 of The Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972 [1851]. Hawthorne, Julian. Confessions and Criticisms. Boston: Ticknor, 1887. ———. ”The Desire for Truth.” The Booklover’s Weekly, 25 November 1901, in “Miscellany,” Box 6, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. ———. England, by J. R. Green, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne. 4 vols. New York: Cooperative Publication Society, 1898. ———. Fortune’s Fool. 3 vols. Boston: Osgood, 1883. ———. Garth: A Novel. 3 vols. New York: Appleton’s, 1877. ———. Hawthorne and His Circle. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903. ———. Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography. 2 vols. Boston: James R. Osgood 1885. ———. Hawthorne’s History of the United States. 3 vols. New York: P. F. Collier, 1898; revised edition, 1900. ———. “Hawthorne’s Philosophy [1884].” Holo. MS.S., Bixby HM 12215, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. ———. Holland: The History of the Netherlands, by T. C. Gratton, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne. New York: Collier, 1899. ———. “Is Spiritualism Worth While?” Arena 3 (May 1891): 674–79. ———. “Literary Lights of Old Concord.” Typescript, box I, Julian Hawthorne Papers [ca. 1896–1939]. Banc MSS 87/23 c. Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. ———. “The Picture Show.” Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z. Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. ———. “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century.” Scrapbook 2, Hawthorne Family Papers, Banc MSS 72/236z. Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. ———. Spanish America, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. New York: P. F. Collier, 1899. ———. The Spectre of the Camera; or, The Professor’s Sister: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus, 1888. ———. The Story of Oregon: A History with Portraits and Biographies. 2 vols. New York: American Historical Publishing, 1892. ———. The Subterranean Brotherhood. New York: McBride, Nast and Company, 1914. ———. “Thinking Things Over.” Julian Hawthorne Papers, Banc MSS 87/23c, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif. Bibliography { 437

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 437437 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM ———, and Leonard Lemmon. American Literature: A Text Book for Use of Schools and Colleges. Boston: Heath, 1896. Herbert, George B. The Popular History of the Civil War in America (1861–1865). New York: F. M. Lupton, 1884. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill Battle. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875. Howitt, Mary Botham. A Popular History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860. Irving, Washington. History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. 3 vols. New York, T. Y. Crowell, [1828]. ———. Knickerbocker’s History of New York. 2 vols. New York: Knickerbocker Press; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894 [1809]. Knight, Charles. The Popular History of England: An Illustrated History of Society and Government from the Earliest Period to Our Own Time. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856. Lippard, George. Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution . . . With a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by Rev. C. Chauncey Burr. Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1847. ———. The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall. A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime. Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1844. Lossing, Benson John. Harper’s Popular Cyclopaedia of United States History. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893. ———. Our Country: A Household History for All Readers. 3 vols. New York: Henry J. Johnson, 1875–1878. ———. The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or , Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence. 2 vols. 1850–1852; reprint, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855. Mabie, Hamilton W. Mabie’s Popular History of the United States. Philadelphia: Fidelity Publishing, 1897. Markham, Edwin. The Real America in Romance. 13 vols. New York: William H. Wise, 1909–1910. Musick, John R. Columbian Historical Novels: Being a Complete History of the United States from the Time of Columbus to the Present Day, with Reading Courses. 13 vols. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893–1894. Pae, David. A Popular History of the Discovery, Progress and Present State of America. Edinburgh: T. Grant, 1852. Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1910 [1851]. ———. Essays from the North American Review ( January 1852): 358–62. 438 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 438438 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1212:59:12 PMPM Ridpath, John Clark. “The Cry of the Poor.” The Arena 18 (September 1897): 407–18. ———. “Is History Acquainted with Providence?” Program for the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers, June 28, 29, 30 and July 1 and 2, 1897. “Programs, 1892–1897, 1902.” L217, Western Association of Writers Collection, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, Ind. ———. “The Man in History.” Indiana Historical Society Publications 2, no. 7. Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1893. ———. People’s History of the United States. Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1895. ———. A Popular History of the United States, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day. New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1877. ———. Portfolio of the World’s Photographs: Royal Photograph Gallery. Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1893. ———. “Prosperity: The Sham and the Reality.” The Arena 18 (October 1897): 487–93. ———. Ridpath’s History of the World. 3 vols. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1885; New York: Merrill and Baker [1897]. ———. Ridpath’s Universal History. 4 vols. New York: Hall and Locke, 1893. ———, and Edward S. Ellis. The Story of South Africa: An Account of the Historical Transformation of the Dark Continent by the European Powers and the Culminating Contest between Great Britain and the South African Republic in the Transvaal War. Springﬁ eld, Mass.: King-Richardson, [c1899]. Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962. Steele, Joel Dorman, and Mrs. Esther B Steele. Barnes’ Popular History of the United States. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1875.

Works on Individual Historians

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT Brown, Charles H. William Cullen Bryant. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. Bryant, William Cullen, II. “William Cullen Bryant after 100 Years.” In William Cullen Bryant and His America: Centennial Conference Proceedings, 1878–1978, edited by Stanley Brodwin and Michael D’Innocenzo. New York: AMS, 1983. Godwin, Parke. A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1883. McLean, Albert F., Jr. William Cullen Bryant. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1964. N[evins], A[llan]. “William Cullen Bryant.” In Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 19, edited by Dumas Malone. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943. Bibliography { 439

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 439439 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM Peckham, Harry Houston. Gotham Yankee: A Biography of William Cullen Bryant. New York: Vantage, 1950. Ringe, Donald A. “Bryant’s Use of the American Past.” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 41 (1956): 323–31.

EVERT A. DUYCKINCK Ehrlich, Heyward. “Evert Augustus Duyckinck.” In American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850–1880, vol. 64 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by John W. Rathburn and Monica M. Green. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. Goodspeed, George T. “The Home Library.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 42 (1948): 110–18. Greenspan, Ezra. “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, 1845–1847.” American Literature 64 (December 1992): 677–93. Mize, George E. “The Contributions of Evert A. Duyckinck to the Cultural Development of Nineteenth Century America.” PhD diss., New York University, 1953. Osgood, Samuel. Evert Duyckinck, His Life, Writings, and Inﬂ uence: A Memoir. Boston: David Clapp, 1879. Wells, Daniel Arthur. “Evert Duyckinck’s Literary World, 1847–1853: Its Views and Reviews of American Literature.” PhD diss., Duke University, 1972. Yannella, Donald. “Evert Augustus Duyckinck.” In Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, vol. 3 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Joel Myerson. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979. Yannella, Donald, and Kathleen Malone Yannella. “Evert A. Duyckinck’s Diary: May 29–November 8, 1847.” In Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, edited by Joel Myerson. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

EDWARD EGGLESTON “Edward Eggleston: An Interview.” The Outlook 55 (6 February 1897): 431–37. Eggleston, George Cary. The First of Hoosiers: Reminiscences of Edward Eggleston. Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1903. Randel, William. “Edward Eggleston.” In American Realists and Naturalists, vol. 12 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. ———. Edward Eggleston. New York: Twayne, 1963. Trent, William P. “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins.” The Forum 22 (1896–97).

EDWARD S. ELLIS Camp, Paul Eugene. “Edward S. Ellis.” In American Writers for Children Before 1900, vol. 42 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. 440 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 440440 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM “Edward Sylvester Ellis.” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol 19. New York: James T. White, 1926. [Morton, Levi Parsons]. “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.” In Edward S. Ellis, Popular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to Present Time: Including Complete Triumphs of the 19th Century. Chicago: George Spiel, 1900. “News.” Mercer County Community College Newsletter, April 12, 1970, 2. “Honorary Degree File, Edward S. Ellis,” Box 6, Honorary Degree Index, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. Rogers, Denis R. “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis.” Dime Novel Roundup 54 (October 1985): 74–76. Scharnhorst, Gary. “Edward Sylvester Ellis.” In American National Biography, vol. 7, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

SYDNEY HOWARD GAY “Sydney Howard Gay.” Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 7. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943. “Sydney Howard Gay.” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol 2. New York: James T. White and Company, 1921. Willcox, Mary Otis Gay. “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay.” Typescript. Special Manuscript Collections, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University, New York.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE Bassan, Maurice. Hawthorne’s Son: The Life and Literary Career of Julian Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970. Collins, Mabel. “The Son of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Dublin University Magazine 90 (August 1877). Hawthorne, Edith Garrigues, ed. The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne. New York: Macmillan, 1938. “Hawthorne-Lemmon on American Literature.” Conservator 7 (December 1896): 151–53. Heywood, H. C. “A Son Who Would Emulate His Father.” In How They Strike Me, These Authors. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877. “Julian Hawthorne, 1846–1934.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 25, edited by Dennis Poupard. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Knox, George. “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian of California.” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 39, no. 1 (March 1957). Miller, Harold P. “Julian Hawthorne.” In Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 21, supp. 1, edited by Harris E. Starr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943. Bibliography { 441

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 441441 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM Pendleton, S. H. “Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made.” New York Times, 13 May 1899, BR314.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Adams, Charles Francis, Jr. “Hawthorne.” The Harvard Magazine. Cambridge, Mass.: John Bartlett, 1855. ———. “Hawthorne’s Place in Literature.” In The Hawthorne Centenary Celebration at the Wayside, Concord, Massachusetts, July 4–7, 1904. Boston: Houghton, Miffl in, 1905. Choate, Rufus. “The Importance of Illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances.” New England Magazine, November 1897. Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne. Memories of Hawthorne. Boston: Houghton, Miffl in, 1897. Pfi tzer, Gregory M. “When Life Imitates Art: Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s Curious Reader-Response to Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.” American Transcendental Quarterly, n.s. 8, no. 2 ( June 1994): 77–95.

WASHINGTON IRVING Adams, Charles. Memoir of Washington Irving. Freeport, N.Y.: Carlton and Lanahan, 1870. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Springer, Haskell. Washington Irving: A Reference Guide. Boston, G. K. Hall, 1976.

GEORGE LIPPARD [Boulton, John Bell]. The Life and Choice Writings of George Lippard. New York: H. H. Randall, 1855. Buhle, Paul. “George Lippard and Popular Literary Traditions.” Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, no. 2. San Francisco: City Lights, 1983. Reynolds, David S. George Lippard. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

BENSON JOHN LOSSING Mahan, Harold. Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the United States, 1830–1890. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

EDWIN MARKHAM “A Conversation with Edwin Markham, on The Poet as a Teacher.” The Arena 28 (December 1902). Duncan, Charles. “Edwin Markham.” In Nineteenth-Century American Western Writers, edited by Robert L. Gale, vol. 186 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. 442 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 442442 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM Filler, Louis. The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Signiﬁ cance. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1966. Flower, B. O. “Edwin Markham: Poet of Democracy.” In Progressive Men, Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-Five Years. Boston: The New Arena, 1914. Originally published as “Edwin Markham: The Poet-Prophet of Democracy,” The Arena 35 (February 1906). Shields, Sophie K. Edwin Markham: A Bibliography. 3 vols. Staten Island, New York: Wagner College.

JOHN R. MUSICK, JOHN Selby, P. O. “John R. Musick.” Bits of Adair County History 6 ( January 1972– November 1974).

JOHN CLARK RIDPATH Carson, William W. “John Clark Ridpath.” In Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 15, edited by Dumas Malone. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943. “John Clark Ridpath.” In The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 6. New York: James T. White, 1929. “John Clark Ridpath.” The Review of Reviews Magazine, March 1895. Phillips, Clifton J. “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian.” DePauw Alumnus, December 1957. Taylor, Tucker Woodson. “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography.” Cincinnati, 1894.

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, edited by Mary C. Simmons Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953.

Narrative, Memory, Historiography Adams, Ephraim Douglass. The Power of Ideals in American History. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969 [1913]. Adams, George Burton. “History and the Philosophy of History.” American Historical Review 14, no. 2 ( January 1909): 221–36. American Historical Association. The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven. New York: Macmillan, 1900. Andrews, C. M. “These Forty Years.” American Historical Review 30 ( January 1925): 225–50. Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth About History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Bibliography { 443

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 443443 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM Barnes, Harry Elmer. The New History and the Social Studies. New York: Appleton- Century, 1925. Bassett, John Spencer. The Middle Group of American Historians. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Becker, Carl. “Detachment and the Writing of History.” Atlantic Monthly 106 (October 1910): 525–36. ———. “Everyman His Own Historian.” In Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics. New York: F. S. Croft, 1935. ———. “What Are Historical Facts?” Western Political Quarterly 7 (September 1955): 327–40. Berkhofer, Robert, Jr. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Breisach, Ernst A. American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brinton, Crane. “The ‘New History’ and ‘Past Everything.’ ” American Scholar 8 (1939), 144–57. ———. “The New History, Twenty-Five Years After.” Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 134–47. Brooks, Van Wyck. “On Creating a Usable Past.” Dial 64 (11 April 1918): 337–41. Burgess, John William. “On Methods of Historical Study.” In Methods of Teaching and Studying History, edited by G. Stanley Hall. Boston, 1886. Bushman, Claudia L. America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992. Butterﬁ eld, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell, 1931. Calkins, N. A. “Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, with the Reports of the Conference Arranged by Committee.” New York: Published for the National Educational Association by the American Book Company, 1893. Callcott, George. History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Charles, R. F. “The Use of Historical Romances in the Teaching of History.” The Educational Times, November 1897. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Comstock, Anthony. Traps for the Young. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967 ([1883]. 444 } Bibliography

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 444444 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1312:59:13 PMPM Cronon, W. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Harrative.” In The History and Narrative Reader, edited by Geoffrey Roberts. New York: Routledge, 2001. Curthoys, Ann, and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 [1997]. Dow, Earle W. ‘Features of the New History: Apropos of Lamprecht’s ‘Deutsche Geschichte.’ ” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 441. Dunning, William A. “A Generation of American Historiography.” In Truth in History and Other Essays, with an introduction by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1937. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1954. Fahs, Alice. “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the Northern Literary Marketplace, 1861–1868.” Book History 1.1 (1998): 107–39. Fisher, Sydney G. “The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 51 (1912): 64–65. Fitzgerald, Frances. America Revised: What History Textbooks Have Taught Our Children about Their Country and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades. New York: Random House, 1979. Fitzpatrick, Ellen. History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Forgie, George B. Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Gay, Peter. Style in History. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Gilreath, James. “Mason Weems, Mathew Carey, and the Southern Booktrade, 1794–1820.” Publishing History 10 (1981): 27–49. Glassberg, David. Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geologic Time. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987. Hamerow, Theodore S. “The Bureaucratization of History.” In the “AHR Forum: The Old History and the New.” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 ( June 1989): 656–57. Harlan, David. The Degradation of American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Bibliography { 445

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BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 454454 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Index

Abbey, Edwin A., 117–18 presidency, 12, 213–18, 241; found- Abbott, Jacob, 42, 187 ing, 9, 64; Ridpath’s rejection by, 147; Abbott, John S. C., 61 scholarly approaches, 274–75, 334 Acton, Lord ( John Dalberg), 224 American Historical Review, 70, 218, Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 285 225, 262 Adams, Charles Kendall, 69, 145, 165, American Whig Review, 55 240 Andersen, Hans Christian, 291 Adams, Ephraim Douglass, 284 Anderson, John J., 247 Adams, George Burton, 164–67, Andre, John, 47–48, 312 174–76, 220–21 Andrews, Charles M., 65–66, 225 Adams, Henry, 166, 176, 265 Anti-Imperial League, 222, 268 Adams, James Truslow, 332 Anti-Slavery Standard, 84 Addams, Jane, 149 Appleby, Joyce, 225 Agents’ Companion, 44 Appleton, W. W., 204 Aldine, 294 Arcturus: A Journal of Books and All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Opinion, 19–20 Warren), 346–47 Arena, 170–75, 189, 300 Allston, Washington, 290 Arnold, Benedict, 25–27, 47–48, 51, 312 Amelung, May “Minnie” Albertina, 293 Art and Artists of All Nations ( John “America Made Easy: McCullough, Clark Ridpath), 205–6 Adams, and the Decline of Popular Asbury University (Greencastle, History” (Sean Wilentz), 342–45 Indiana; later DePauw University), American (newspaper), 301 125–30, 188 American Association of Writers, 149. Atlanta Constitution, 177, 300 See also Western Association of Writers Atlantic Monthly, 298 American Bibliopolist, 114–19 Auld, Jedediah B., 19 American Book Company, 203, 223 Austin, Jane Goodwin, 286, 315 American Copyright Club, 24 American Experience, The (David Mc- Backus, M. M., 57 Cullough), 339 Baltimore Sun, 301 American Hebrew, 213–14 Balzac, Honoré de, 57 American Heritage, 343 Bancroft, George, 7, 41; philosophy of American Historical Association (AHA): history, 186; as scholarly authority, complaints about pseudo-history, 147, 242, 247; as unread historian, 69–70, 121, 164, 175; Eggleston’s 29, 191–92, 264

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 455455 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Barber, John Warner, 42 Book of Anecdotes, or the Moral of His- Barnes’s Popular History of the United tory, The ( John Frost), 48 States ( Joel Steele and Esther Steele), Book of Good Examples Drawn from 5, 41 Authentic History and Biography, The Bassan, Maurice, 245 ( John Frost), 48 Bassett, John Spencer, 36, 69–70 Book of Ruth, The, 290 Battle of Bunker Hill, 317–18 Boorstin, Daniel, 46 Beadle, Erastus, 231–32 Boston Daily Globe, 119–20, 178 Beadle and Adams, 234–35, 245 Boughton, George, 117 Beard, Charles, 168, 221, 265, 284 Bourne, Edward, 240 Becker, Carl, 166, 221, 227, 258, 265, Boy Patriot, A Story of Jack the Young 274–76, 281, 307 Friend of Washington, The (Edward S. Beer, George, 212 Ellis), 234 Beginners of a Nation, The (Edward Breisach, Ernst, 168, 181–83, 221, 270, Eggleston), 209–21; modernist style 273 in, 211; observational point of view, Bressant ( Julian Hawthorne), 294 209; place of irrational and profane Brinton, Crane, 207 in, 210–11; psychology in, 210–11; Brooklyn Eagle, 211 saturation method of history writing Brooks, Van Wyck, 274–75, 332 in, 214; the scope of history, 218–20; Brothers to Dragons (Robert Penn success of among professional histori- Warren), 346 ans, 214–15; unillustrated format, 213 Brownlow, Parson, 188 Bel of Prairie Eden (George Lippard), 43 Bryan, William Jennings, 170, 300 Bellamy, Edward, 254 Bryant, John, 79 belles lettres, 29, 129, 241 Bryant, William Cullen, 75–102, 186, Bem, General Josef, 137–38 288; conception of history as acted Bem Method, 137–39, 196, 291, 323 events, 80–81; contract with Scrib- Ben Hur (Lew Wallace), 149, 385n. 88 ner’s, 77–79; death of, 101–3; divided Bergson, Henri, 182 voice, 76; as epistemological skeptic, Berkhofer, Robert J., Jr., 9, 124, 138–39, 124; Julian Hawthorne’s boyhood 167, 180, 208, 279, 304 memories of, 288–90; philosophy of Beveridge, Albert, 178 history of, 80; as public vs. private ﬁ g- Bierstadt, Albert, 117 ure, 75–77; sentimentality in, 79–83; Billington, James, 342–43 use of theatrical metaphors, 80–82 Birth of a Nation, The, 281 Bryant’s Popular History of the United Black Aunt, The, 291 States (William Cullen Bryant and Blanche of Bradywine (George Lippard), Sydney Gay), 83–120; changes in tone 43 in vols. 3 and 4, 105–10; Gay’s re- Bolton, Sarah, 150 strained prose in, 98–100; debunking book agents, 1–2, 22, 56–58, 68 of Washington Irving, 90; treatment

456 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 456456 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM of Dutch, 91–92; treatment of Native Clevio, Giulio, 290 Americans, 96–97; treatment of the Clodfelter, Noah, 154–55 Pilgrims, 93; treatment of the Puritans, collaborative histories, 217 93–96 Collier, Peter F., 305–6, 319 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 156 Collier’s Weekly, 305 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 244 Columbian Historical Novels, 335 Burckhardt, Jacob, 184, 190 Columbus, Christopher, 37–40, 53, 90, Burgess, John William, 69 336 Bushman, Claudia, 37–38 commodifi cation of history, 7, 14, 53, 56 Butterfi eld, Herbert, 276 Commons, John R., 285 Butterworth, Hezekiah, 316 Comstock, Anthony, 230–39 Comte, Auguste, 156 Callcott, George H., 5, 30–31, 34 Confessions and Criticisms ( Julian Haw- Camp, Paul, 233 thorne), 296 “Campaigning with Crook” (Edward S. Conner, Henry, 237–38 Ellis), 234 Conquest of Mexico, The (William Carey, Matthew, 21 Prescott), 31 Carnes, Mark, 254 constructed history, 29, 88 Carson, Kit, 231, 243 Cooper, James Fenimore, as historical Carson, William W., 165 novelist, 34–35, 232, 235, 243 Catherwood, Mary H., 150–51 Copyright Club, 58–59, 221 Century, 200, 204–6 Cottman, George S., 150 Century Club, 215 “Courtship of Miles Standish, The” Channing, Edward, 69, 242, 276, 286 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), 286 “Character of Washington, Its Infl uence Crane, Rev. J. T., 57 and Importance, The” ( John Frost), “Cry of the Poor, The” ( John C. Rid- 47 path), 171 Chautauqua Institute, 195 cult of the fact, 124 Cheney, T. Apoleon, Dr., 98 cultural democratization, 5 Chicago Daily Tribune, 173 “Culture of the Imagination, The” Childhood in Literature and Art (Horace (W. A. Jones), 20 Scudder), 230 Cumback, Will, 150 “Christian Martyrs Given to the Lions,” Current Literature, 215 347 Curthoys, Ann, 18 Christian Parlor Magazine, 57 Curtis, George W., 59 chromolithography, 296–97 Cushman, Charlotte, 289 Civil War, 64–65; in Bryant and Gay, Cyclopedia of American Literature 81–82; in Ellis, 251 Literature (Evert A. Duyckinck and Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, George Duyckinck), 19, 31, 36, The ( Jacob Burckhardt), 184 54–55, 74

Index { 457

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 457457 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Cyclopedia of Universal History ( John C. Dodge Foundation for Citizenship, 284 Ridpath), 132 Dreiser, Theodore, 188 Dumas, Alexander, 29 D. Appleton and Company, 196–206 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 150 Dabney, Robert H., 69 Dust (Julian Hawthorne), 296 Daily Gazette (Greencastle, Ind.), 128 Duyckinck, Evert A., 10, 19–72, 288; Davenport, Reuben Biggs, 212 biography of 19–20; originality and Davidson, Cathy, 21 American literature, 23–24; and Scott, De Forest, John W., 207 28–29; and Tetractys Club, 19–20 “De Louisiana Cane Brakes: Negro Song Duyckinck, George, 19 Chorus” (Edward S. Ellis), 231 De Navarrete, Don Martin Fernandez, 37 Eclectic Primary History (Edward S. De Stael, Madame, 57 Ellis), 279 De Voto, Bernard, 332 Economic Interpretation of the Constitu- Deane, Harry, 231 tion, The (Charles Beard), 284 decline of popular history, 10, 14 Edison, Thomas, 272, 281 Deerfoot on the Prairie (Edward S. Ellis), Eggleston, Allegra, 203–4 234 Eggleston, Edward, 12–13, 186–226; Deerslayer, The ( James Fenimore abandons ﬁ ction in favor of history, Cooper), 34 192–93; and American Copyright “Democracy of Letters, The” ( John C. League, 221–22; American Histori- Ridpath), 153 cal Association presidency, 215–16; democratization of literature, 58–59 biography of, 186–89; co-editor of DePauw University, 125–30, 188 The Independent, 188–89; collabora- DePauw, Washington C., 148 tions with his children, 203–4; col- “Desire for Truth, The” ( Julian Haw- laborations with his wife, 203; false thorne), 295 consciousness, 208; “History of Life “Detachment and the Writing of His- in the United States,” 192; illness and tory” (Becker), 274 death, 206, 226; obsession with re- Dewey, John, 184 search, 194–95; Owl’s Nest, 194–95; Dexter, Henry M., 94–95, 137 as realist writer, 189–91, 211; as Dial, 201 reformer, 188–89; rejection of military Dictionary of American Biography, 76, 295 history, 193; resistance to “academiz- Dilthey, Wilhelm, 182 ing” history, 219 discovery of time, 255 Eggleston, George, 188–89 Docker, John, 18 Eggleston, Lillie, 193, 195, 203–4, 206, Doctorow, E. L., 282 221, 224 Documentary History of American Ehrlich, Heyward, 19–20 Industrial Society ( John R. Commons Einstein, Albert, 303 and Ulrich B. Philips), 285 Eliade, Mircea, 251–55, 276

458 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 458458 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Eliot, Charles W., 240 fi ctional history, 25–27, 337 Eliot, Samuel, 32, 55 Finney, Patrick, 333 Ellis, Annie (wife of Edward S. Ellis), First Book in American History (Edward 249 Eggleston), 222 Ellis, Edward S., 13, 231–81; adultery First International Congress of Histori- case and divorce, 249; biography of, ans, 176 231; as composer and songwriter, Fiske, John, 178, 195 231; death of, 281; interest in movie- Fitzpatrick, Ellen, 216, 224–25 making, 281; nostalgia and memory Florida Times-Union, 201 in works of, 243–44; use of pseud- Flower, Benjamin O., 170–71, 177, 335 onyms, 234; presentism in works Flowering of New England, The (Van of, 265–68; personal bankruptcy, Wyck Brooks), 332 280; quest for historical authenticity, Ford, Paul Leicester, 217, 287 235–36; recycling literary materials, Fortune’s Fool ( Julian Hawthorne), 296 243–44; sensation scenes in works of, Forum, 209, 217 232–33 Foulke, William Dudley, 150 Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 120 Fredericks, Alfred, 117 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 23, 288–89 Freud, Sigmund, 182 Emerton, Ephraim, 164–67 Frost, John, 10, 41–42, 47–54; biogra- “Endicott and the Red Cross” (Nathan- phy of, 47–48; fi nancial troubles, 48 iel Hawthorne), 285 Funk and Wagnalls, 335 Enoch, Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked ( John Frost), 47 G. P. Putnam and Company, 31–34, epistemological crisis in history, 181, 339 40–41 “Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made” Garrigues, Edith, 329 (S. H. Pendleton), 323–24 Garth ( Julian Hawthorne), 296 “Evangeline” (Henry Wadsworth Long- Gay, Peter, 181 fellow), 315–16 Gay, Sydney Howard, 10–11, 84–122, Everett, Alexander, 38–39 259; and American Historical Asso- Everett, Edward, 32 ciation, 125; aversion to bombastic lit- “Everyman His Own Historian” (Carl erary expressions, 86–87; biography Becker), 265 of, 84–85; contract, 84–85, 103–5; Eytinge, Sol, 117 problems with Scribner’s Sons, 102–12; relationship with Horace Fable for Critics, A ( James Russell Greeley, 108; scientifi c approaches to Lowell), 19 history, 89 Fahs, Alice, 15, 53–54 Gibbon, Edward, 161 Faith Doctor, The (Edward Eggleston), Glassberg, David, 338 222 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 55 Felton, Cornelius, 58, 66–67 Godkin, E. L., 61, 294–96

Index { 459

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 459459 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Godwin, Parke, 76 Hassam, Childe, 235 Golden Days, 231, 235 Hawthorne, Elizabeth (Aunt Lizzie), 291 Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), Hawthorne, Fred, 299 334 Hawthorne, Julian, 13–14, 288–331; Goode, Frances, 203 boyhood, 287–93; commercial quali- Goodrich, Charles Augustus, 21 ties of writing, 301; death of, 330; ﬁ - Goodrich, Samuel G., 21 nancial concerns, 299; imprisonment Gotham of Yasman (Noah Clodfelter), for mail fraud, 327–30; irreverence for 154–55 truth, 298–99; as journalist, 299–302; Gould, Stephen Jay, 252–57 the mind/body problem, 295; as nov- Great Rebellion, A History of the Civil elist, 294–99; photographic method War and the United States ( J. T. of novel-writing, 296; relationship Headley), 188 with father, 288–94; relationship with Great Story, the, 30, 50, 80, 143–44, mother, 289–90; relativistic stand, 189 303–4; interest in socialism, 330 Greeley, Horace, 108 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 20, 58, 285, 287 Green, J. R., 194, 242 Hawthorne, Rose (Mother Alphonse), Greenberg, Paul, 344 330 Greenspan, Ezra, 20 Hawthorne, Una, 291 Grifﬁ th, D. W., 281 Hawthorne’s United States ( Julian Griswold, Rufus, 55 Hawthorne), 305–27; anti-material- Guide to the Study of American History ism in, 310–13; assessment of women (Edward Channing and Albert Bush- in, 313; attitude toward Native nell Hart), 69, 242, 286 Americans in, 313–15; illustrations Guizot, Francois, 5, 161 in, 319–20; picturesque effects in, Gutjahr, Paul, 4, 22, 305 315–16; philosophical idealism in, 309, 318; romantic tropes in, 316 Hale, Edward Everett, 103 Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Hallock, Mary, 117 Limited, 327–31 Hamerow, Theodore, 83–84 Headley, J. T., 40, 42, 188 Harlan, David, 9 Health, Wealth and Happiness Harper and Brothers, 22 ( Edward S. Ellis), 231 Harper’s Family Library, 24 Hearst, William Randolph, 301 Harper’s Magazine, 113, 120, 200 Hearth and Home, 189 Harper’s Weekly, 294 Henry, Caleb Sprague, 28 Harris, E. L., Mrs., 57 Herbert, George (Capt.), 65, 188 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 69, 218, 240–43, Herodotus, 193 275, 286 “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?” (Paul Harte, Bret, 190, 222 Greenberg), 314 Harvard Magazine, 285 Higham, John, 164, 170, 218, 343

460 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 460460 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 200, 208, History of the World ( John C. Ridpath), 210–11, 220, 277–78, 281, 283 1–3, 6, 16, 72, 131 Hinman, Richard, 204–5, 223 Holiday, 231 “Historians and Our Aristocrats” Home Library series, 40, 258 (George Eggleston), 212 Homer, Winslow, 117 historical materialism, 284 Hoosier School-Master (Edward Egg- Historical Publishing Company of Phila- leston), 189, 192, 385n. 88 delphia, 160 House of the Seven Gables, The (Natha- historical relativism, 283–84 nial Hawthorne), 285–86, 288, 316, “History by the Yard” (E. L. Godkin), 318 61 Household History of the United States history for history’s sake, 277 and Its People, The (Edward Egg- History Made Visible (George Crossup), leston), 4, 12, 196–206; inadequacy 138 of illustrations in, 200–201; and the “History of American Life” (Arthur Mexican War, 198–99; narrator as Schlesinger, Sr.), 224 external to action, 198–99; thick History of Art in the Netherlands (Hip- descriptions of daily life, 198; uneven polyte Taine), 191 quality of, 199 History of Liberty, The (Samuel Eliot), Houssaye, Henri, 176 32 Howells, William Dean, 189–90 History of Our Country, The (Edward S. Howitt, Mary Botham, 7, 41 Ellis), 258, 260–61. See also People’s Hudson, W. L., 320 Standard History of the United States Huge Hunter; or Steam Man of the Prai- History of Rome (Barthold Georg ries, The (Edward S. Ellis), 232–33, Niebuhr), 25 243, 272 History of the American Constitution Hugo, Victor, 57, 176 (George Bancroft), 130 Hull, William, 97–98 History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac Hume, David, 191 (Francis Parkman), 31, 236–37 Humors of the Fair ( Julian Hawthorne), History of the Life and Voyages of Chris- 302 topher Columbus (Washington Irving), Hunters of the Ozarks (Edward S. Ellis), 37–40 234 History of the Navy ( James Fenimore Hurst and Company, 68 Cooper), 34 Hutchinson, Anne, 52 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 193 Idolatry ( Julian Hawthorne), 298 History of the United States (George I. S. Platt, Publishers, 40 Bancroft), 41 Independent, 188, 192, 221 History of the World (Sir Walter Raleigh), “Instructions for Prospective Writers,” 194 234–35

Index { 461

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 461461 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1512:59:15 PMPM International Monthly, 70 Lawrence Scientiﬁ c School, 293 Irony of American History, The (Rein- Lays of Ancient Rome (Thomas B. hold Niebuhr), 339 Macaulay), 291–92 Irving, Washington, 10, 35–40, 56, 186, Learned, H. B., 275 242, 333; as biographer, 37–40; rela- “Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The” (Wash- tionship with Evert Duykinck, 35 ington Irving), 36 Irwin P. Beadle and Company, 231 Legends of Mexico: The Battles of Taylor “Is History Acquainted with Provi- (George Lippard), 43–46 dence?” ( John C. Ridpath), 150 Lemmon, Leonard, 302 “Is History a Science?” (Robert H. Lepper, George H., 173 Dabney), 69 Leuchtenburg, William, 1 “Is History a Science?” ( John C. Rid- Levin, David, 29, 139 path), 155–56 Levine, Lawrence, 16–17, 70–71, 80, 296, 97, 325 Jakes, John, 337 Library of American Books series, James, Henry, 185 20–34, 40–41, 56–59, 66, 289 Jameson, J. Franklin, 69, 71–72, 92 Library of Choice Reading series, Johannsen, Albert, 244 20–24, 40, 56 John Adams (David McCullough), Life and Voyages of Christopher Colum- 341–45 bus, The (Washington Irving), 37–40, Jones Brothers Publishers, 148, 265 68–69, 90, 247 Jones, William Alfred, 19–20 Life of George Washington, The (Wash- Julian, George W., 173 ington Irving), 149 Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, The Kasson, Joy, 244 (Edward S. Ellis), 236–37, 245 Kent Family Chronicles, The, 337 Life of Washington, The (Mason Kessler-Harris, Alice, 228 Weems), 21 King, Rufus, 121–22 “Lines to Professor John Clark Ridpath” Klein, Kerwin Lee, 334 ( James Whitcomb Riley), 152 Knickerbocker History of New York Lippard, George, 10, 42–48, 54–56 (Washington Irving), 19, 92, 247; Lippard’s Magazine of American Histori- distinctions between fact and ﬁ ction cal Romance, 60 in, 36–37 Lippincott and Company, J. B., 22 Knight, Sir Charles, 74, 184 Lippincott’s, 302 kulturgeschichte, 184, 190, 198 Literary News, 201, 224 literary pointillism, 185 Lamartine, Alphonse, 28–29, 176 “Literary Prospects of 1845” (Evert Lamprecht, Karl, 182 Duyckinck), 20–33, 59, 308–9 Larned, J. N., 41, 145, 174 Literary World, 19, 60 Laughlin, Clara, 151 Loeser History Club, 273

462 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 462462 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM Loewenberg, Bert, 157 McGill, Meredith L., 40 Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe), McLean, Albert J., Jr., 76 1–3 McRae, Col. Sherwin, 119 Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), McWilliams, James, 343–44 254 Melville, Herman, 289 London Weekly Review, 38 memory showmanship, 244 long chronology, 256 Messenger, 222 Long, Huey, 1–3, 346–47 Method in History for Teachers and Stu- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 286, dents (William H. Mace), 275 315–16 Michelet, Jules, 216 Los Angeles Herald, 214 Miller, Max, 294 Lossing, Benson John, 3–4, 41–42 Miller, Perry, 55 Lowell, James Russell, 19 Mills, Col. Albert L., 236 Lowenthal, David, 250, 276, 278 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), 289 Lyell, Charles, 217 Mommsen, Theodor, 176 Monthly Review, 38–39 Mabie, Hamilton W., 7, 41 Moran, Thomas, 117 Macaulay, Thomas B., 161, 191, 194, Morison, Samuel Eliot, 332–33 242, 333 Morton, Levi Parsons, 237 Mace, William H., 275 Motley, John Lothrop, 7, 31, 247, 288 Mach, Ernst, 180–81 Musick, John R., 335 Magazine of American History, 13 Mystery of Metropolisville, The (Edward “Man in History, The” ( John C. Rid- Eggleston), 190 path), 156–57 “Man with the Hoe, The” (Edwin Narrative and Critical History of the Markham), 335 United States ( Justin Winsor), 217 Manual of Historical Literature, A Nathan, Daniel, 42 (Charles Kendall Adams), 69, 165 Nation, 61, 294 Markham, Edwin, 40, 334–38; associa- National Education Association, 241, tion with the masses, 335; peri- 248, 259, 273 odization schemes, 336–38; use of Nations of the World, The, 305, 324 romantic conventions, 335–36 Neal, John, 56 Marx, Karl, 176–77 Nelson and Phillips, 132–33 Marxist history, 70, 168, 283–84 Nevins, Allan, 14, 76, 332 Mather, Cotton, 312, 320 New Deerfoot Series (Edward S. Ellis), Mathews, Cornelius, 19, 58 280 Matthews, J. Brander, 287 New History (Edward Eggleston), 182, “Maypole at Merry Mount, The” 200–209, 211–12, 220, 228–55, 275 (Nathanial Hawthorne), 285 New History ( John C. Ridpath), 157, McCullough, David, 14, 341–45 175

Index { 463

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 463463 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM New Republic, 342 Pendleton, S. H., 323–24 New York Evening Post, 75, 84 People’s History of the United States, New York Journal, 300 A ( John C. Ridpath), 4, 160–70, New York Mirror, 38–39 203; human agency and free will in, New York Times, 74, 178, 234–36, 242 163–64; language of evolutionary 249 growth in, 163; misappropriation of New York Tribune, 84, 108, 302 images in, 160–61; political tone of, Nicholson, Meredith, 150 167–68; sensitivity to races, 162–63; Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 25–26, 61–64, universal laws of explanation in, 66 161–62, 164–68 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 339 People’s History of the United States, A Nield, Jonathan, 286–87, 337 (Howard Zinn), 341 Nordau, Max, 29 People’s Standard History of the United Norman, Andrew, 340 States, The (Edward S. Ellis), 13, North American Review, 58, 61 258–74, 279–81; dime novel sensa- Norton, Charles Eliot, 59 tionalism in, 262–63; the eternal pres- “Novel Writers and Publishers” (M. M. ent in, 264–65; future-mindedness Backus), 57 in, 270–73; home study of, 258–59; Novick, Peter, 16, 30, 64, 67–68, 84, scholarly techniques in, 259–60; 215, 264, 281 sense of participation in the past, Nye, Russel, 45, 229, 232 263–64; subjectivizing philosophy of history in, 265–67; treatment of Na- objectivity and history, 16, 134–35 tive Americans in, 259 “On Creating a Usable Past” (Van Wyck “Perils of Historical Narrative, The” Brooks), 274 ( Justin Winsor), 217 Oonomoo, the Huron (Edward S. Ellis), Peterson, T. B., Publisher, 45 237 Philadelphia Dispatch, 45 Oregon Trail, The (Francis Parkman), 31 Philadelphia Record, 60 Osgood, Herbert L., 215 Philips, Ulrich B., 285 Outline of History (H. G. Wells), 270–71 “Philosophy of History, The” ( John C. Outlook, 189, 214 Ridpath), 129 Owl (magazine), 101–2 “Philosophy of Justice, The” ( John C. Ridpath), 146 Pae, David, 41 “Picture Show, The” ( Julian Haw- Palfrey, John Gorham, 247 thorne), 296 Parker, Benjamin, 150 “Picturesque Transformation, A” Parkman, Francis, 7, 31, 191–92, 236, ( J. Hawthorne), 296 242, 245 Pilot, The ( James Fenimore Cooper), Peabody, Sophia Amelia (Julian 235 Hawthorne’s mother), 290 plagiarism, 53, 237

464 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 464464 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM Pocahontas, 25; in Bryant and Gay, metaphors in, 144; intellectual goals 90–91; in Eggleston, 197, 319–20; in of, 132; irreversibility of time in, 138; Ridpath, 141–42 linearity in, 144; use of melodrama in, Poe, Edgar Allan, 19 142; Native Americans as “doomed “Poet of the Future, The” (Frederick race” in, 139–40; prose style in, Jackson Turner), 153–54 137–38; Puritans in, 134–35; the role “Poet-Historian, The” ( James Whit- of reason in history, 135–36; romantic comb Riley), 152 impulses in, 139–40; Salem Witch- Political Science Quarterly, 225 craft Trial in, 136–37 Popular Amusements (Rev. J. T. Crane), 57 Popular History of the World (Edward S. Popular Historical Series, 316 Ellis), 251–58, 280; contemporary “Popular Histories and their Defects” ﬂ avor of, 254; cyclical history in, ( James Harvey Robinson), 70 256–58; panoramic view of history in, popular history, deﬁ nition of, 3–17, 252; praise for, 258; use of the sacred 41–42 past in, 250–51; universal philoso- Popular History of America, A (Hezekiah phies of history, 253 Butterworth), 316 Popular School History of the United Popular History of the Civil War States ( John J. Anderson), 247 (George Herbert), 65, 188 Portfolio of the World’s Photographs Popular History of the Discovery, Prog- ( John C. Ridpath), 270 ress and Present State of America, A Post-Express (Rochester, N.Y), 213 (David Pae), 41 post-modernism and history, 339 Popular History of England, The (Sir “Poverty and Crime” ( John C. Ridpath), Charles Knight), 74–75 146 Popular History of France from the Earli- Powers, Hiram, 289 est Times, A (Francois Guizot), 5, 305 Power of Ideals in American History, The Popular History of the United States (Ephraim Douglass Adams), 284 of America from the Discovery of the prehistory, 256, 268 American Continent to the Present Prescott, William H., 4, 31, 37, 191, Time (Mary Botham Howitt), 7, 41 242, 247 Popular History of the United States profane time, 276–77 ( John Frost), 41–42, 48–54; Colum- professionalization of history, 9–10, bus in, 53; narrative approaches in, 61–64, 67–72 49–53; Native Americans in, 53; role progressive historians, 274 of Providence in, 49–50 Prose Writers of America (Rufus Gris- Popular History of the United States wold), 55 (Hamilton W. Mabie), 41 Public Opinion, 231 Popular History of the United States, A ( John C. Ridpath), 132–46; chrono- Quaker City; or, Monks of Monk Hall, logical foreshortening in, 138; cyclical The (George Lippard), 43

Index { 465

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 465465 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM “Questions for the Next Administration Robinson, James Harvey: challenges of to Consider” (Edward S. Ellis), 268 New History, 182–86, 207–8, 265, 269, 271, 278; rejection of sensation- “Radicalism” ( John C. Ridpath), 146 alism, 68, 70, 239–40; the scope of Raleigh, Sir Walter, 194, 206 history, 179, 219, 229, 248; the spe- Randel, William, 187, 206 cious present, 265, 269, 271, 278 reading circles, 204 Rogers, Denis R., 233 “Reading of Historical Novels and Rollin, Charles, 191 the Study of History, The” (Ada Roosevelt, Theodore, 42 Shurmer), 323 Rosenberg, Emily, 340 Real America in Romance, The (Edwin Ross, Dorothy, 219 Markham), 335–38 Roxy (Edward Eggleston), 190 Red Rover, The ( James Fenimore rule of mortmain, 278 Cooper), 235 Russell, Don, 234 relativist’s dilemma, 278–79 Remington, Eva, 200 sacred past, 251–52 Remington, Frederic, 200–204 salesmen’s dummies, 22, 259–62 “Report of the Committee of Ten on Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Secondary School Studies,” 239, Opinions of Launcelot Langstuff, 241, 248–49, 273 Esq., and others (Washington Irving), reprinting of texts, 24 35 revival of narrative, 338–39 Sanborn, Francis B., 190, 293 Reynolds, David, 40 Sand, George, 57 Rhodes, James Ford, 215 Sandburg, Carl, 332 Ridpath, Abraham, 146 Santayana, George, 180 Ridpath Historical Society, 148 Scarlet Letter, The (Nathaniel Haw- Ridpath, John Clark, 11–12, 124–78, thorne), 285, 288, 307, 385n. 88 243; boyhood, 125; as a college Scharnhorst, Gary, 243 student, 125–29; death of, 177–78; Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr.,224–25 death of father, 145–46; dictation Scots Magazine, 323 method of writing history, 131–32; on Scott, Sir Walter, 28–29, 250 Abraham Lincoln, 128; nomination Scribner, Charles, 74–122; disagree- to Congress, 170; as poet, 151–55; ments with Gay over illustrations, as professor, 129–49; sentimental 116–19; disagreements over the pace posturing, 127; as social reformer, of writing, 102–5; threats to renegoti- 171–73 ate Gay’s contract, 104–5 Riley, James Whitcomb, 151–60 Scribner’s Sons, Publishers, 74–76, 82 “Rip Van Winkle” (Washington Irving), Scudder, Horace, 230 36 Segal, Daniel, 256 Robertson, Rev. C. F., 121 “sensation scenes,” 81–82

466 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 466466 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Fron- Stories of Great American for Little tier (Edward S. Ellis), 13, 231–32, Americans (Francis Goode), 203 243 Story, William, 288 Sever, Henry Edwin, 148 Story of South Africa, The (Edward S. Seward, William, 237 Ellis and John C. Ridpath), 243 Shaw, Dr. Albert, 177 Streeby, Shelley, 242 Shi, David, 180, 324 “Study of History in Schools, The” Shurmer, Ada, 323 (Committee of Seven), 216, 241. See “Signiﬁ cance of History, The” (Freder- also National Education Association ick Jackson Turner), 183 subscription publishing, 6, 44, 56, 100, Simms, William Gilmore, 10, 24–33, 66 145, 188, 259 Sketchbook, The (Washington Irving), Subterranean Brotherhood, The ( Julian 187 Hawthorne), 330 Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and De- Sumner, William Graham, 230 cline of Secession (Parson Brownlow), 188 Taine, Hippolyte, 156, 176, 191 slavery: in Bryant and Gay, 106–8; in Tarkington, Booth, 150 Hawthorne, 312–13 Tatham, David, 119 Sloane, William, 138, 219 Tetractys Club, 19, 150 Smith, Theodore Clark, 332 Thalheimer, Mary Elsie, 130 Smithsonian World, 339 Thierry, Augusta, 28, 215–16 social history, 12, 183–85, 228 Thomas, Amy, 57–58 “Song of Marion’s Men” (William Cul- Thompson, Jack Carter, 7 len Bryant), 33 Thoreau, Henry David, 288–89 Spanish-American War: in Eggleston, Thucydides, 193 222–23; in Ellis, 268–69; in Haw- Time Machine, The (H. G. Wells), 254 thorne, 321–22 time’s cycle/time’s arrow, 273, 252–57 Sparks, Edwin E., 264–65, 323 Trailing Geronimo (Edward S. Ellis), Spectre of the Camera, The ( Julian Haw- 234 thorne), 297 Transit of Civilization, The (Edward Spencer, Herbert, 267 Eggleston), 224–25, 303–4 Spy, The ( James Fenimore Cooper), 47 Traps for the Young (Anthony Com- Standish of Standish ( Jane Goodwin stock), 230 Austin), 286 Trautmann, Thomas, 256 Stanton, Frank L., 177 Trent, William P., 209 Steele, Joel and Esther, 5, 41 Trevett, Russell, 19 Stories from American History True Stories in Biography and History ( Edward S. Ellis), 262 (Nathaniel Hawthorne), 33–34 “Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians” (Edward S. truthful ﬁ ctions, 26–28 Ellis), 236 Tuchman, Barbara, 14

Index { 467

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 467467 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM Turner, Frederick Jackson, 183, 224, “What Our Boys Are Reading” (William 274 Graham Sumner), 230 Twain, Mark, 76, 189, 222–23 Whig Interpretation of History, The Two Admirals, The ( James Fenimore (Herbert Butterﬁ eld), 276 Cooper), 235 White, Hayden, 32, 67, 176–77, 269, 345 Union for Practical Progress, 170 Whitehead, Alfred, 284 Universal History; or, The Great Races Whitrow, G. J., 255 of Mankind ( John C. Ridpath), Whittier, John Greenleaf, 20 157–60 Widmer, Edward T., 23, 56 usable past, 274 Wilentz, Sean, 14, 342–45 Wilkinson, James, 16 Vail, Henry, 223 Williams, T. Harry, 1 Van Camp, Watson F., 249 Wilson, James Grant, 378n.195 Victor, Orville J., 235 Wilson, John Scott, 178 Views and Reviews in American Litera- Wilson, Woodrow, 145, 240, 330 ture, History and Fiction (William Winsor, Justin, 186, 208, 217, 248 Gilmore Simms), 25–27 Wise, William, 335 Vincent, John, 213 Wiley and Putnam, Publishers, 20–22, Vincent, W. D., 302 31 Vitzthum, Richard, 53 Wolfe, General James: Edward Ellis on, 247–48; Justin Hawthorne on, 317 Wallace, Lew, 149, 385n. 88 Wolfe, Thomas, 1, 6 Walpole, Horace, 28 Wonders of History, The ( John Frost), Warren, Robert Penn, 81, 346 48 Warsaw Daily News, 150 Woodward, C. Vann, 333–34 Washington and His Generals; or, Wright, Chauncey, 174 Legends of the Revolution (George Lippard), 44–46 Yale University Press, 218 Washington Bust and Statuette Com- “Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to pany, 378n. 195 Spain, The” (Edward S. Ellis), 231 Washington, Booker T., 300 York Commercial Advertiser, 212 Waud, Alfred, 117 Young Americans, 20–33 Waud, William, 117 Youth’s History of the United States, Weems, Mason, 5–6, 20–21 The (Edward S. Ellis), 244–51; ac- Wells, H. G., 254, 258, 270–71, 276 cusations of distortions in, 246–48; Wendell, Barrett, 31, 225 altering historical quotations in, 245; Western Association of Writers (WAW), casual use of time in, 249–50; use of 149–60, 189, 205. See also American dime novel materials in, 245; nostal- Association of Writers gic temperament in, 246; sensational-

468 } Index

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 468468 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM ism in, 245–46; temporal stretching Ziff, Larzer, 43 in, 250; the “timeless past” in, 250 Zinn, Howard, 143, 341 Zola, Emile, 296 Zeldin, Theodore, 185 Zieber, G. B., Publishers, 45

Index { 469

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 469469 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1612:59:16 PMPM BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 470470 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1712:59:17 PMPM Gregory M. Pfi tzer was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in various midwestern towns, primarily Cincinnati. He attended Colby College, where he earned a BA in American studies and history, and Harvard University, where as a Danforth Fellow he earned an MA in history and a PhD in the history of American civilization. He began teaching at Skidmore College in 1989 and is currently chair of the American Studies Department. Pfi tzer is the recipient of the Harvard University CUE Guide Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Knox College Philip Green Wright-Lombard Prize for College Teaching, and the Skidmore College Ralph A. Cianco Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is the author of two previous books, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World and Pictur- ing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900, as well as journal articles on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Mark Twain, and Winslow Homer and a piece on science fi ction literature. Greg Pftizer lives in Wilton, New York, with his wife, Mia, an X ray technician, and his two children, Michael and Sally.

BBook-pfitzer.indbook-pfitzer.indb 471471 112/3/20072/3/2007 12:59:1712:59:17 PMPM